[Image description: a thicc green hornworm hanging onto the stem of a tomato plant. The hornworm is speckled with little white dots, has eyespots and angular white stripes down his side, and the namesake sharp little spike of a horn on its butt.]

I have... thirty different types of tomatoes.

Which are your favorites? Which do you dislike?

What am I missing that I should add to my arsenal in the future?

!

[Image description: a seed starting tray, each cell with a label, the first few cells have little tomato seedlings.]

3 different family members have given me tomatos and they keep spoiling

I'm in Zone 5, so my sights are now set on what to do with what is left at the end.

A tomato soup? Hot or Cold?

What if I have to pull plants early due to a cold snap?

A green tomato soup? Hot or Cold?

I'm just looking for ideas, or what you do with your extras. We also can in my household, but I don't foresee having enough tomatoes left at the end of the season to warrant going through the whole canning process.

Thoughts?

(PS @Thrawn: My volunteer sun golds did end up producing after my hornworm invasion. Not much, but they did... and they looked true! I just left them on the plant, as they has blossom end rot, unfortunately... so I can't tell you how they tasted.)

I am hoping to have some new tomatoes to play with in my indoor garden and wanting to make some unique ketchup and sauce. My varieties are: Black Beauty, Ananas Noir, Sart Roloise, and Great White.

Ive been looking at different ketchip recipies. It would be fantastic if the Great White kept its white color during blanching and processing for ketchup.

Process is pretty simple, let the seeds and pulp sit in water for a couple days, then rinse and dry. Worth extra effort for the better germination rates!

[Image descriptions: 1st image is of several jars on a kitchen counter containing varying red to yellow shades of goo floating in water. 2nd image is of a wet sieve with tomato seeds over a sink, with an empty jar in the background. 3rd image is of the seeds spread out on numbered paper towels on a kitchen counter.]

[Image description: a hand holding a large beefsteak tomato bottom up, with grey stitching in a line along the bottom and up one side, and alternating thin swirled stripes of red, yellow, and green spreading from the bottom stitching.]

Poor Golden King of Siberia. I've noted that they are particularly susceptible to getting toasted.

[Image description: a hand holding a yellow tomato. On one side, the tomato skin is bleached white and leathery, and the flesh has sunken in.]

Science - How Tomatoes Lost Their Taste

Turns out these green shoulders are a result of the same gene that controls the amount of sugar present in ripe fruits. When farmers selected for a mutation that produced uniformly red tomatoes, they sacrificed flavor.

[Image description: a hand holding a glass bowl stuffed with red plum and cherry tomatoes. Most of the plum tomatoes have splashes of green on their tops and shoulders.]

I'm looking to compile a list of places to buy tomato seeds. Let me know if you've got something to add, particularly for sellers outside of the US!

Places I've purchased from:

• Baker Creek
  • Probably my favorite. I'm a sucker for free shipping and free seed samples, they've got a great review section with photos and their catalogue is just eye candy for browsing. However, some people have disavowed them due to their inviting Cliven Bundy to speak back in 2019.
• Johnny's Selected Seeds
  • Good germination, and has options for disease-resistant varieties, but on the expensive side if you're not buying in bulk, and the shipping is pricy too.
• San Diego Seed Company
  • I like to support local growers to me, they say their seeds are better adapted to the climate here, but I haven't seen a significant difference in my plants. Sometimes cheaper per seed than other places, but they could use better filtering options on their site.
• Victory Seeds
  • Have varieties I've not seen on the other three, including many dwarf and micro types (just bought a few to try out growing indoors over the winter), but man what awful photos! I'll admit I'm shallow, but consistent, well-lit, high resolution photos of tomatoes are much more appealing.

Places I've not yet purchased from:

• Adaptive Seeds
• Artisan Seeds
• Bounty Hunter Seeds
• Delectation of Tomatoes
• Eden Brothers
• Happy Cat Farm
• MIgardener
• Renaissance Farms
• Seed Savers Exchange
• Seeds Now
• Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
• Territorial Seed Company
• Tim's Tomatoes
• Tomato Growers Supply
• TomatoFest
• Totally Tomatoes
• Urban Farmer
• Wild Boar Farms

[Image description: a raised garden bed with a focus on a small tomato plant. The lower branches along the stem are brown and dead, but the upper branches have healthy new growth.]

Sad I missed out on getting a ticket for the tomato tasting happy hour they're holding in LA this Saturday, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for the next!

Though that Black Pineapple I'm pretty sure must have crossed with something else, it's normally green with splashes of red, not orange with red.

[Image description: a cutting board with seven medium to large sized tomatoes of varying colors, with the name next to each. The tomatoes are the Golden King of Siberia, the Black Pineapple (or Ananas Noire), the Berkeley Tie Dye Green, the Sart Roloise, the Dr. Wyche's Yellow, the German Pink, and the Black Beauty.]

[Image description: three roughly heart-shaped slices of a yellow beefsteak tomato tinged with pink, on a blue plate.]

Tried these for a few seasons before I finally had to admit they weren't suited to my climate/gardening style. They're deliciously sweet, but go from underripe to overripe very quickly, and don't hold well on the vine or on the counter. That meant the overripe fruit would often pop between my fingers as I was picking them.

[Image description: a hand holding two yellow cherry tomatoes with deep red shoulders, the greenery on the tops of the tomatoes has been plucked off, revealing bright yellow star shapes where the fruit was shaded.]

Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.

I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20' in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.

It's insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn't store well at all.

The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.

[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]

[Image description: a hand holding a bright yellow, medium sized, heart shaped tomato. The tomato has some light scaring and zippering near its shoulders.]