Tomatoes & Peppers: Your top choice, 1 by evelyn_inthegarden

evelyn_inthegarden wrote:
Peggy ~ Maybe you can put your tomatoes in containers or raised beds. There are many different methods that people use that do not have good soil. My best tomatoes grew in a bed with only peat, perlite, vermiculite and organic compost. This one had none of my "dirt" and did not suffer one bit.

This year the most productive was the Pink Pink Pong, but I cannot say it was the tastiest. I liked Kellog's Breakfast for BLT's. They were a very nice slicing tomato with few small seeds. The Romas did ever so well and were just perfect, with only a few BER, but only in the beginning of the season.

So far, the dwarf tomatoes were all a disappointment, as there were only a couple of tomatoes the whole season. I am saving the seeds for the project, but if they do not do well next year, I will just turn in all my seeds back to the project. I think that I will try something different for them as well. Maybe large pots in a sunnier area, though it gets quite hot during July and August. That is the only thing I can think of to correct the growing environment.

I will also have new soil for them like the new square foot garden that grew the Pink Ping Pong so well. The Kellogg's Breakfast was in a large pot, as I ran out of planting room. Maybe I will dig out all the raised beds (SFG's) and put new soil in them as well since all the others seem to decline. They were not diseased, but just were not vigorous. Maybe Carolyn has an answer. I know in the past she said that tomatoes can be grown in the same soil year after year, if there are no diseases. But maybe that only applies to in the ground. I did grow some in the ground and the gophers ate most of them.

So all of you that have grown a lot of tomatoes, none of you can say that there is ONE tomato. (IMHO, there never is.) And sometimes, one will grow perfectly one season, and then, poop out the next, and then have another be a better grower, but not have all the flavor you want. I think that Carolyn is the expert in this group and even she cannot say that there is ONE favorite above all...is there??