Sunday, January 17, 2010

Tomato seeds...yes, I really needed more

My order from TomatoFest arrived a few weeks ago, but I'm just getting around to showing it off. New varieties include:

Principe Borghese - Italian, good for paste and maybe drying

Black Zebra - love Green Zebra and thought I'd give the "black" version a try as well

Poland II - a paste tomato that seemed like a good choice

Amish Gold - most excited about this one! It's a stabilized cross between Sungold and Amish Paste

Black Cherry - cherry tomatoes grow well here and I love the flavor of many "black" tomatoes

Japanese Black Trifele - I've heard the flavor is incredible

Yellow Stone - a freebie...what a bad name for a tomato!

I love the selection from TomatoFest! You can spend all day there :) Although, I do wish the seed packets had pictures of the actual variety, like on the website. But it would probably cost more to do that, so maybe it's not worth it.

I'm in the process of allocating garden space to each variety. I know that I want to grow more paste tomatoes for saucing...Amish Gold I'm thinking of you. But do I really want to give a lot of precious, central coast, real estate to a newbie?

6 comments:

Bren Haas said...

Thanks for sharing... I can't wait to check them out. BIG Tomato grower here... stop by my site sometime!

Dan said...

Nice selection! I grew the Japanese Black Trifele two years ago and they certainly are very good. I am growing them again this year.

Anonymous said...

I always wanted to try new tomato varieties, just one or two plants of each. But then what would I do with all that seed in packets? Do you keep it for next year?

Melinda said...

Yum! It's fun experimenting with new seeds! Hope they all germinate for you.

Curbstone Valley Farm said...

"Amish Gold I'm thinking of you. But do I really want to give a lot of precious, central coast, real estate to a newbie?"

I will if you do :P Your blog post is quite timely. I spent all afternoon yesterday browsing TomatoFest trying to narrow down our choices for this year, and Amish Gold made my list too! I've grown Sungold for years, and am interested to see how this turns out. As I'm also on the Central Coast, maybe we can compare notes at the end of the season.

Also, I see you're growing Black Trifele this year. We grew a similar variety last year, Black Pear, that was phenomenal here! Our notes from last year's tomatoes are here:

http://curbstonevalley.com/blog/?p=283

We will grow Black Pear again this year, but I'd be interested to see how its performance is to your Black Trifele. I almost went with that instead this year just to see how it does...but black pear did so well, I can't resist planting it again. Of last year's crop, we're also replanting Persimmon, and Cherokee Purple this year, but the all the rest will be new varieties...if I can just make up my mind! So many choices!!!

Jackie said...

Dan, I'm glad to hear that you like JBT.

vrtlarica, yes I save the seed for next year. It is good for at least a couple of years.

Curbstone, I would love to compare results on our tomatoes at the end of the year. Happy to have another central coast tomato grower around!