- So let's get started with some of the basics.
I'm going to be starting every tomato in six cells.
These are pretty small overall
in terms of how much soil volume there is.
I'm using these universal bottom trays
which are essentially built to last a lifetime.
And now, really quickly about the soils that's in here.
I like to do something a little different for my tomatoes.
This is a mixture of high-quality potting mix, compost,
a little bit of worm castings,
and all that together is more nutritious
than a standard seed-starting or potting mix.
And the reason why I do that
is because I'm going to be putting
more than one tomato per cell.
I'm going to be letting them get pretty big
before I actually split them up and transplant them.
So I wanted to make sure I have enough nutrients in there
to support multiple tomatoes per cell,
and to give them plenty of nutrients
so they can grow nice, big, and vigorous.
Now, I actually went through and chose all my tomatoes
and pre-wrote the labels.
On each label I wrote the name of the variety,
what kind of growth habit it has.
so like indeterminate, determinate, maybe dwarf.
And then I wrote tomato
just so I knew that these were all tomatoes.
And the last thing I wrote
is sort of the style of tomato that it is.
So in this case, I wrote cherry tomato.
For others I might write big, medium, something like that
so that I know when I grab the tag exactly what I'm growing.
Let's start with the Sakura.
This is a small cherry tomato
that has a lot of disease resistance
and tends to ripen pretty early.
So this is one of the earlier cherry tomatoes
I'm expecting to get.
It should be quite vigorous throughout the whole season,
'cause it's one of these tomatoes
that's used a lot in production growing.
Now, the next one up is Gardener's Delight.
This is from Botanical Interests.
It is a cherry style tomato and it is an indeterminate.
So this one's called Sugar Lump apparently as well.
They are very flavorful and sweet,
so I wanted to give that a try.
My overall tomato selection for cherries
is pretty weak, I have to say.
So this year I'm making a concerted effort
to try to grow a few more cherry tomato varieties,
something different.
And this is definitely a new one to me.
Now, next one up is one that I grow
every single year without fail,
and that is the Sun Gold cherry.
This is such a classically delicious tomato.
It has this really bright pop of sweetness,
but also has a lot of complex flavor.
It's not just like sugar and nothing else.
Now, this is one of these varieties that's well known
and quite famous for how delicious it is.
It can be hard to find in the store
because they have a tendency to crack.
Now, last year me and Kevin decided
that since they crack so easily,
we actually harvested them a little bit early
and let them ripen indoors,
which reduced a lot of that cracking
and lets you enjoy that tomato for much longer.
This next tomato is quite special.
It's one that I've always heard about.
I believe it goes by a different name as well.
In this case, the variety's been named Godzilla.
This is a really fascinating tomato.
Now, imagine you had a large beefsteak tomato,
but instead of it being one tomato,
is actually like 10 to 20 tomatoes stuck together.
That's basically what this ends up looking like.
But legend has it that it's one of these tomatoes
that was bred for snacking.
So you would grow this big tomato,
throw it in your backpack
when you go hiking in the mountains.
Every time you'd get hungry,
you would just rip off a little chunk,
snack on it, and keep going.
So overall, this guy's definitely going to be
a unique one that brings a lot of character in the garden.
I'm excited to see if it actually tastes good though.
All right, next up is Sweetie, which is a cherry tomato.
You might notice that some of them say pole or bush.
Pole is another way of saying
that it's an indeterminate tomato.
So that means that it's going to be growing
for a long period throughout the season.
It's fruit ripeness is going to be happening
over a long window,
instead of a determinate tomato
which tends to grow for a certain period of time
and set all of its fruit at once.
Now, this next one is new to me once again.
It is Austin's Red Pear tomato.
Now, this one comes from Seed Savers Exchange
which is one of my favorite places to get seeds.
They do a great job of preserving and carrying on.
So this one is similar to the Yellow Pear,
which unfortunately I'm the only one in this house
who really likes the Yellow Pear.
I think it's really creamy
and makes a really nice tomato sauce.
But others don't like it as much.
It's not as complex of a tomato flavor,
but something about the creamy texture of it I really like.
So I wanted to try this Red Pear
to see if I can maybe convert some people in this house.
So before we get to the big, beefy slicing tomatoes
that everyone loves and knows to grow every single year,
I'm actually going to be mixing it up this year
with a selection of determinant tomatoes.
So all of these come from Botanical Interests.
I'm gonna quickly read off some of their variety names.
This one's Mountain Merit,
which has apparently excellent flavor.
So you know I have to get that.
Ace 55 which has a lower acidity.
So we'll see how I like that one.
Italian Roma, which is a classic Roma style tomato.
Should be great for making sauces.
Supremo, which is another sort of Roma style tomato.
Again, great for sauces.
And the last one here is Glacier,
which is a classic variety
that is known to bear tomatoes
quite early in the season and quite vigorously
even when it's cold.
So that's a nice guy to really start off the season,
'cause it's going to do well
in a wide variety of conditions.
So since these are all new to me
and I actually don't know which one
I'm going to like the most,
I'm only going to start two cells each of each variety.
And I'm gonna grow 'em all out this year,
and see the one that I like the most
so that I can continue to grow that next year.
So I'm not gonna go too crazy on these.
But I'll probably put two seeds per cell
just to ensure that I have ideal germination.
While I finish planting
these last couple of determinant tomatoes,
want to quickly show you guys
exactly how I like to fill these six cells
for your best success.
And here's how I actually like to fill my 6-cell trays.
Get a big scoop of soil,
throw it into each one of them.
And then I come through with two fingers.
I poke through the bottom of each one of these six cells.
So if I flip it over, you can see that there's soil
all the way at the very, very bottom of the tray.
That's ideal for when you're bottom watering,
'cause then the soil will wick up the moisture,
bringing it all the way to the top.
Then we come back to fill these all the way.
And we're gonna take our soil
and loosely just top off each tray,
scrape the surface, and that's it.
You'll get a tray that has soil at the bottom
for easy bottom watering and isn't too compact,
'cause at the end we just scooped in some light, fluffy soil
without any compaction whatsoever.
Now, let's get into the tomatoes that I'm most excited for,
and that is the big boys:
these are the heirlooms, the slicers, the beefsteaks,
whatever you want to call them.
They tend to be a slightly larger tomato.
And all of these are indeterminate,
so they share a couple of qualities here.
Actually, I did lie.
There are a couple mid-sized tomatoes in here.
And there's actually a really unique one
that we're gonna start with first,
and it's name is Boronia.
And it's actually a dwarf tomato.
Now, there are two kinds of dwarf tomatoes
that you might have heard of.
There's micro dwarfs which are those tiny tomatoes
that you could grow in like a half gallon pot.
And they only get like one foot tall
and have a bunch of cherry tomatoes.
I grew a few of them last year.
This year I decided that I'm going to cut back
on how many I'm growing,
just 'cause I wanna try some new varieties.
But the one that made my list to grow again is Boronia
because it is a Cherokee Purple-esque type tomato.
And that is my favorite tomato
for eating on fresh salads, fresh tomato sandwiches,
anything like that where you're actually just enjoying
and eating the fruit itself.
Next up from Johnny's Seeds is Granadero.
This is a plum style tomato
that I'm very excited to be growing again
'cause it has resistance to powdery mildew.
Now, powdery mildew can be pretty annoying
here in San Diego.
Since we're on the coast,
we tend to get a lot of this coastal fog
which powdery mildew just absolutely loves.
So I wanted to try growing
a powdery mildew-resistant variety,
and this guy was the one that came up.
It makes wonderful plum tomatoes
that make a really great sauce.
We had really fallen in love with it last year
because it did truck through all the powdery mildew.
I had less overall, but it also seemed to be less affected
when it did get powdery mildew.
So I'm definitely growing this one again
to make lots of tomato sauce this year.
This next one is called Trophy tomato,
and it comes from the Seed Savers Exchange again.
This one's called Trophy
because it used to sell for $5 a packet back in 1870,
which apparently is equivalent to $80 today.
Now, of course, it's not that expensive right now.
This is a standard seed packet price.
But apparently it's quite delicious,
and was rumored to have won a lot of trophies
for its prize taste.
This tomato is probably the most famous one in this list.
It is the Cherokee Purple,
one of the kind of big heirloom tomatoes
to kickstart our heirloom tomato craze that we are in today.
And it's actually one of my personal favorites.
Now, some people don't like
the kind of darker purplely tomatoes.
I find that Cherokee Purple isn't really that purple.
It just has this kind of purple blush to it.
So this is one that every year
if I'm somewhere where I can grow tomatoes,
and trust me, I'm not gonna live anywhere
where you can't grow tomatoes,
I'm going to be growing Cherokee Purple
'cause it's just our standout favorite.
We haven't found one that we really like more than this.
Every year we just keep coming back to it.
This next one I remember growing,
but I can't quite remember how I felt about it.
It's called Italian heirloom, a very descript name.
This is one that's considered to be
one of the more productive tomatoes
and also one of the tastiest tomatoes
by Seed Savers Exchange.
So to me, that's all I really need to hear.
It's delicious. It's won taste awards.
And it's productive. Sign me up.
So let's go ahead and grow a bunch of these guys as well.
All right, as I said,
here is another Cherokee Purple type tomato.
This one's called Cherokee Carbon.
This is a hybrid version of the Cherokee Purple I believe.
It is a cross between two heirlooms.
I'm actually not sure right now
whether it's an F1 hybrid or not,
meaning that it's true to seed.
Now, this is a plant that I actually purchased
from the nursery as a ready-start last year.
I saw Cherokee and I knew that I had to have it.
And it was really delicious.
It had a smaller fruit
than the Cherokee Purple in my experience,
but the flavor was so outstanding.
And it actually produced a lot more
than the Cherokee Purple heirloom itself.
So I'm really hoping that that's true again this year.
This is the first time I've grown it from seeds.
And I'm really happy to see that Botanical Interests
has that available.
Now, one thing I'll mention really quickly
is that when you go into the world
of sort of hybrid tomatoes rather than heirlooms,
their prices are going to be a lot more expensive.
So this one is $6 for a seed pack,
whereas the standard Cherokee Purple is 2.29.
So this one costs three times as much,
and you get half the amount of seed.
And that's because it's just labor intensive
to produce these hybrid tomatoes.
You can't just take the seeds and regrow them.
You have to manually create them every year.
So it takes a little bit more effort,
but hopefully that effort pays for itself
in terms of the disease resistance, the yield,
things like that, or like the vigor of the growth itself.
So that's why you kind of choose those hybrid tomatoes
over the heirloom tomatoes sometimes,
'cause you just need a little bit more disease resistance
or you need a little bit more vigor, anything like that.
Generally, that's what they breed those hybrid tomatoes for.
This next one's actually pretty funny.
It's called Lava Flow.
And you can see it's in a white unlabeled packet
'cause I saved the seed myself.
And it actually says from Kevin's salsa bed.
So it's from 2021.
So Kevin grew this a couple of years ago.
And I remember I took a tomato home.
Me and Katrina tried it, and we're like,
"Oh, this is a really good tomato."
I looked it up: it was a actual heirloom, so not a hybrid,
which meant that the seed would be true to growth.
And so I fermented some seed and set it aside and saved it.
So this year I'm going to be growing it.
I believe it comes from Hawaii;
that's why it's called Lava Flow.
And they're a pretty nice kind of smaller-sized tomato
and maybe only two to three inches across,
which is really great for salads, salsas, things like that.
So this guy is a classic heirloom type tomato.
It's called a Dester. It's been around for a long time.
It's called Deeply Satisfying. It is a pink beefsteak.
And then it looks like it makes a pretty good size.
I actually haven't opened this one.
So this is a new tomato variety to me.
So let's see if we like it.
I have heard about it before.
It is one of those well-known heirloom tomato varieties.
So we'll see how it goes this year.
Up here we have another home-saved seed.
This is Omar's Lebanese.
It makes this really big, huge kind of pink beefsteak.
Actually, I save this seed in 2020.
So it's now a couple of years old.
And I might have done it on the paper towel method
instead of the fermenting method.
This was definitely saved.
It's sort of this classic old-school method
where instead of fermenting the seed,
you actually just take the seed,
stick it to a paper towel, and then let it dry.
This doesn't preserve the seed
as long as a fermentation does.
But if you're just growing it after one or two years,
it should be very viable,
and it's really quick and easy to plant.
All you do is you tear off a little piece of paper
that has that tomato seed on it,
and that's what you actually just throw in the ground.
The paper's not gonna do any harm. It'll just biodegrade.
And the tomato will farm with no problem.
So I'm gonna go ahead
and spray the surface of all these seeds
to make sure that they're nice and wet
and stick to the soil, and they can't blow around.
Next up is another really well known
sort of heirloom tomato.
It's called Moskvich I believe.
This is one of these early tomatoes
that has a name similar to Moscow,
'cause it tends to grow in a colder climate.
So this one says that it has 46-ounce tomatoes,
which is actually quite a nice size,
with a rich classic flavor, and it's cold tolerant.
So if you're living somewhere
where maybe the early summer or spring
is a little bit chilly,
here I'm actually in coastal California
which is a little chillier at the start of the season,
so this should actually do quite well here
at that early time of the year.
All right, this next tomato is one
that you're just not going to find
at your average seed supplier,
or maybe anywhere in the United States.
That's 'cause I got it from Bulgaria.
So this one is called Rose de Berne,
and we grew it last year.
We grew actually five different Bulgarian tomatoes.
And from what I recall,
this is the one that we actually liked the most.
It had a wonderful flavor.
It was a nice pink tie-dye tomato
that was maybe about this big,
sort of the size of a nice orange.
And really, the flavor was quite good.
The others were fine,
but the production just wasn't that great.
I think it might have just been a climate mismatch
with where the seed was produced.
But this one for whatever reason did great.
So we're gonna definitely grow this one again.
Okay, we're down to the last couple here.
And this guy is one of these really expensive,
fancy tomatoes that I grew last year.
It's called Marbonne.
It is a maxed-out hybrid.
It's designed to be very vigorous, very disease resistant,
and have a similar flavor to a classic heirloom tomato.
So that's a great tomato.
I definitely wanna try growing it again.
It had a really good flavor.
Honestly, I don't really know
if it outperformed everything that well.
But last year I grew all my tomatoes
in this patch right here,
and they actually all ended up suffering
from root-knot nematode.
So I don't know if this is one
of the main disease resistances that it has.
Root-knot nematode isn't really a disease;
it's more of a pest.
So it's kind of harder.
But there are some tomatoes that do apparently do better
against root-knot nematode.
What I'm going to do instead
is just not grow tomatoes right here this year.
The last two tomatoes are the ones I'm most excited for.
First up is Fortamino,
which is actually technically a rootstock tomato.
So it's a tomato that you actually don't grow
for the fruit at all.
You're not gonna eat this tomato in any way whatsoever.
You're only growing it
so you could graft another tomato onto it.
Now, this is similar to how most fruit trees are grown.
They're all grafted to another sort of fruit tree rootstock.
And that rootstock has a lot of benefits
that it could pass on to the tree that's above ground.
And some of those benefits are disease resistance,
yield, vigor, things like that
where you could could actually take a heirloom tomato,
like a Cherokee Purple, graft it to the Fortamino
and make it grow similar to a hybrid tomato.
You get the best of both worlds
where you get all the resistances, the vigor, the yield
of that sort of hybrid tomato
with that classic flavor of the Cherokee Purple.
So I'm gonna be grafting as may tomatoes as I can this year.
It's a little bit tricky.
It's a little bit harder than just growing a tomato.
So I'm probably gonna have to order another packet of these
so that I have plenty of options.
It can be a little tricky,
but we're gonna be doing a lot of content on that this year.
So stay tuned to see exactly how this process works.
And this is the last seed here that I'm sowing today.
This is the Delicious Hunt.
And this comes from a very special tomato.
It's a tomato I grew this last summer
that weighed a whopping 2.75 pounds,
the biggest tomato I've ever personally grown.
So I actually save the seeds,
'cause I wanna see if I can continue these genetics.
And I don't know, maybe we could do a little giveaway
in the future where you guys
could each get some of these seeds
to try to grow your own giant tomato.
But we'll see if this is true to seed.
Maybe this year it won't be such a giant,
and it'll suffer a little bit more.
But I have pretty high hopes.
I might even share a plant or two with Kevin
to see if he could beat me
using my own sort of tomato seeds.
And it looks like I probably have about, I don't know,
30 or 50 seeds left.
So that's a pretty good stash.
These were fermented,
so they should last for quite a few years.
Now, let's take this tomato sort of tray
and bring it into my special germination chamber.
But first, before I do that, I'm gonna go through,
top each one of these with a little bit of soil
to make sure that they're well seeded
and they have everything they need to grow.
So once I have a decent amount of soil
covering each seed cell, I'll come through
and just pat down on the surface with my hand,
give that good soil contact
to make sure that they can properly germinate.
Now to place these tomatoes
in their special germination room.
All right, in we go to the special germination chamber.
Now, you might be wondering how I built this.
And I discussed it in a previous video
which I'll link right here.
And if you guys wanna see another video like this
but about peppers, let me know down in the comments.