In today’s newsletter podcast, nursery owner Don Shor and I share success and failure stories from our 2023 tomato gardens. We both agree that one of the best tomatoes this year that we grew from seed was Rugby F1, a sauce/paste tomato that is large, meaty, and tasty.

In our own yard, Rugby was the overall winner for us. Although it is described in several seed catalogs as a Roma-type tomato, don’t be fooled. Rugby is much larger than other Roma canning tomatoes, about seven ounces each. Pink-red in color, Rugby has meaty flesh that is good for canning. But unlike smaller Roma tomatoes such as San Marzano or Roma VF, Rugby takes well to slicing and can be served on a sandwich or in a salad. Rugby is an indeterminate tomato, and did produce throughout the growing season, with great foliage cover to protect fruits from too much sun. There were few – if any – weather related issues with cracking or sunburn. Rugby is also resistant to diseases such as tomato mosaic virus, leaf mold, fusarium and verticillium wilt, crown and root rots, as well as bacterial speck. We will be planting Rugby again in 2024.

My tomato failure this year was the industry’s fault: a victim of a seed mixup. Here is the purchased, mismarked, packet.

Gardener’s Delight, is an indeterminate German heirloom small tomato, a favorite for years in our garden, with a long growing season and a grape-like shape, a bit larger than a cherry tomato. Oddly enough, although the name on the “Gardener’s Delight” tomato seed package (above) is wrong, the picture was EXACTLY correct. The tomatoes that these seeds produced resembled a run-of-the-mill, red, cherry tomato. That should have been a red flag to me. Whatever variety of cherry tomato that came from the packet of seeds was certainly not one that was a keeper: very little production that ended mid-summer.

This is what a Gardener’s Delight tomato is supposed to look like: a bit larger than a cherry tomato, nor perfectly round, as it tapers a bit on the blossom end. Nor does it grow in tight clusters, as some cherry varieties do.

Chalk it up to another victim of “Jalapeno-gate”, a country-wide (if not world-wide) seed mixup issue that was initially noted by many pepper aficianados - as well as retail and wholesale nurseries this past summer. Read about it here.

However, we enjoy Gardener’s Delight so much, that my plan for 2024 will be to purchase seed of that variety from two different seed catalogs and plant a few from each. I’ll be avoiding the seed catalog source of this year’s Gardener’s Delight failure.

More 2023 Tomato Winners and Losers

Which varieties were successful for you this year? Which tomatoes were a bust? Let me know how yours did.

Meanwhile, over at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, the Sacramento County Master Gardeners conducted their own tomato trials this year. They grew three very popular varieties: Big Beef, Lemon Boy, and Celebrity. And for comparison, they grew the newer, alleged improvements of those three: Big Beef Plus, Lemon Boy Plus, and Celebrity Plus. Were the newer varieties really an improvement? The results were mixed.

During a 30-day period of harvesting in July and August, the original Big Beef tomato plant produced 84 tomatoes with an average weight of 15 ounces. Big Beef Plus, however, only produced 75 tomatoes with an average weight of 8 ounces. Still, the taste testers among the Master Gardeners preferred the taste and texture of the Big Beef Plus, 75% to 25%.

Both Lemon Boy and Lemon Boy Plus tomatoes that were harvested in that same time frame, and produced about the same number (132 to 111) and size (6.8 ounces to 7.5 ounces), although the Lemon Boy Plus had a few larger tomatoes that were beset with cracking. Lemon Boy was preferred by the taste testers to Lemon Boy Plus, by about a three to two ratio.

Celebrity Plus (50 pounds) outproduced the Celebrity tomato (40 pounds), with both varieties having about the same size of tomatoes. The judges were divided on the taste and texture, with 71% preferring the flavor of Celebrity Plus. For texture, Celebrity was favored by 75%. The big difference was the size of the plant: Celebrity stayed fairly compact, about three to four feet tall, while the Celebrity Plus climbed up to the top and over the five-foot cage.

“In our limited demonstration, all plants grew well and had no disease issues,” says the Master Gardener’s final report on the tomato trial. “We will probably keep all of the cultivars on our list to grow again.”

Thanks for reading Beyond Basics: The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thank you for also listening to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast! It’s available wherever you get your podcasts. Please share it with your garden friends.

Fred Hoffman is also a University of California Cooperative Extension Master Gardener in Sacramento County. And he likes to ride his bike(s).

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gardenbasics.substack.com/subscribe