Tomayto-Tomahto

Campus closed for snow and ice, so I'm spending some of my morning picking this year's tomato varieties.


It's hard to choose tomatoes. While the varieties I can buy at Lowe's or Kroger are so hybridized that I can't do much wrong, the heirloom and older varieties are a little more sensitive. For example, I love Black Krims, but they just don't do well in my garden. It's too much work to baby along four or five plants for 10 or 12 tomatoes.

It's also hard to choose because all the varieties look so beautiful in the catalog. It's easy to order too many and end up with 200 tomato plants like we did last year. Who in the world can take care of 200 tomato plants and grow broccoli, too? Not me.

I need some tomatoes for canning. How about Santa Clara Canners? Tomato Growers Catalog describes this tomato as very juicy yet solid, with fruit that weighs 8 to 10 ounces. Perfect for canning. Until I grew Santa Claras, I thought that you were supposed to can the tomatoes that were just not good enough to eat or sell. I highly recommend them. They are kind of picky, though.

When I had to run to the grocery to buy three cans of tomatoes for spaghetti sauce last week, I sorely missed those canned tomatoes gleaming in the pantry. Better not settle for the Santa Claras alone. I think I'll try Bradley, which are described as pink, smooth, blemish free and produce fruits over a concentrated time period. I guess this means I'll have Bradleys overflowing the kitchen sink but only for a little while. These catalog writers must have been trained by the J. Peterman crew.

What else? Paste tomatoes to thicken my sauces: Grandma Mary's Paste, Opalka, Italian Red Pear, Mama Leone, and Howard German. And I can't forget the Polish Linguisas. See what I mean? Six varieties already and I haven't chosen slicers and salad tomatoes yet.

Plenty of choices to make on a cold winter day. I haven't even begun to think of peppers and onions yet.