Tomato Tip #2: Pick Your "Poison" Carefully!

Not all tomatoes are created equal. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of varieties of tomatoes

available. Let's face it, you're not going to succeed with all of them, especially here in Texas.

I went to a "Tomato Seminar" the other day at a local nursery.

"What kind of tomato do you recommend for planting around here?" asked one lady.

"Everything we sell, we recommend for this area," said the Teacher of Tomato. Either he's lying or he's not from around here.

I told him I have never grown a Beefsteak, Big Boy or any of the "Giant" varieties of tomato in Texas that didn't have serious cracking or blossom end rot problems. "That's water stress," he said with arrogant confidence. "Tomatoes need to be kept moist at all times." He suggested if you don't know what "moist" means, buy a hygrometer, and it should register between five and eight out of ten. (Ten being sopping, soaking wet.)

That sounds easy, but let's do some calculating: if I just put my tomatoes in the other day, the big varieties take upwards of 80 days to produce. That's deep in June, when the average day here in Texas is a blistering 90 to 95 degrees, and we'll be lucky to get the average 3.2 inches of rain all month! Water your plants first thing in the morning, and your garden will be bone dry by Texas Tea Time. Oh, by-the-way, you can only water twice a week. You can mulch them up to their armpits, drop shade cloth to keep them cool, but your "Better Boy" or "Big Boy" doesn't stand a chance.

GROW THIS, NOT THAT!

Try growing some of the smaller varieties, like Sweet 100. Those little cherry or grape tomatoes taste fantastic, and they'll produce deep into the heat. If you nurse your plant through the worst heat, the little guys might just rebound, and dress your salad at Thanksgiving!

"But you can't slice a cherry tomato onto a BLT!" whines my bride. (Well you could, but that's not an argument I'm going to win.)

Stick with the "full-sized" tomatoes that are just a bit smaller than the whoppers, and you'll get tasty fruit as big as a baseball.

Last year my Tomato of the Year was Arkansas Traveler. Actually I put in it kind of late in the spring, but I pampered it through the summer, and picked beautiful fruit until Christmas!

This year my tomato patch includes:

My Arkansas Travelers from 2012

• Arkansas Traveler (gotta stick with a winner.)
• Sweet 100 (another sure-fire success)
• Cherokee Purple (a friend of mine recommended it, and the label says "crack resistant")
• Striped German (new for me, but the wife wants to push heirloom varieties)
• Black Prince (Dr. Tomato recommended this, and I've never grown a "black" tomato)
• JD's Special C-Tex Early Black (strictly an impulse buy. The plant looked very healthy, and it has "Tex" in the name. Why not?
• Homestead #24 (Bigger than I planned on, but I'm still trying to keep domestic peace.)
• BHN 444 (Way bigger than I really wanted, but we'll give it a try.) 

If I had all the room in the world, I'd put in a few more cherry tomatoes and a Celebrity or two, but my veggie space is limited.