3 Ways to Choose the Best Tomato Varieties For Your Needs
3 Key Questions
Tomatoes are among the most diverse vegetables there are, and growers want very different things from them, so even a carefully chosen selection runs to well over a hundred varieties. How do you narrow that down to the few that fit you best? Start by answering three questions:
- Habit: What plant type works for you: indeterminate (tall, vining) or determinate (compact, bushy)?
- Location: Where will the plants grow: outside in the open, or inside a protective structure?
- Fruit: Which fruit traits matter most to you? Taste, aroma, color, texture, shape, size, earliness, yield, kitchen use, or something else?
1. Habit • Choose by vegetative growth habit
Your first decision is about the plant's plant habit. Tomatoes fall into two main habit groups, with some less sharply defined in-between types such as semi-determinates and dwarfs.)
Indeterminate.
Vining plants that keep producing new leaves, shoots and flowers indefinitely, until frost or some other cause ends the season.- Because the plants get large, they need sturdier trellising than determinates and more labor for suckering and pruning over the season.
- Indeterminates usually carry more leaves per fruit cluster (about > 3:1) than determinate bush types (about < 2:1), and the extra leaf area often translates into better flavor.
- They also give a longer harvest window than determinates.
- See the key traits side by side in our Indeterminate Tomato Comparison Chart.
Determinate.
Bush tomatoes that grow to a set size and then shift most of their energy from leaves and stems into flowering, fruiting and ripening.- They return more fruit per hour of labor, since they need less hands-on care than indeterminates.
- Their growth is more compact and happens over a shorter period, so they're easier to keep in bounds.
- The fruit ripens within a fairly narrow window, usually giving one or two concentrated main pickings.
- See the key traits side by side in our Determinate Tomato Comparison Chart.
Semi-Determinate.
Semi-determinates fall between the two main groups.- Sometimes called "vigorous determinates," they grow bigger than compact bush types but throw fewer suckers than indeterminates.
- Since their vines are longer than a determinate's but shorter than an indeterminate's, they suit stake-&-basketweave trellising, with stakes at least 3' tall and string woven between them.
- Well-known semi-determinates include 'BHN 589' and 'Celebrity Plus'.
Dwarf.
Most dwarf tomatoes are scaled-down determinates or indeterminates with neat habits suited to small spaces, and many grow well in containers.- Two good patio-type examples are 'Sunrise Sauce,' , a sweet, easy orange paste tomato, and 'Tidy Treats,' , a flavorful, productive red cherry.
For set-up basics on three trellising systems for field or covered growing, see Trellising & Crop Support Systems for Tomatoes: Stake-&-Basketweave, Stake-&-Hanging-String/Wire, Lower-&-Lean.
2. Location • Choose by where you grow your tomatoes
Your second decision is about where the crop will grow: out in the field or inside a structure such as a heated greenhouse or an unheated hoophouse.
Protected Culture.
If you'll grow under any kind of cover, it pays to pick varieties bred for those conditions. Here's the reasoning.-
Greenhouse. The warm, humid air that speeds growth in a heated greenhouse can also favor fungi, bacteria and other pathogens. Exact conditions depend on how much you control temperature, light, airflow and other factors. Varieties bred and selected for greenhouse growing help reduce that risk. Seed for these Greenhouse Performers costs more to produce, though, so it is priced higher than ordinary seed.
For what to look for in a greenhouse tomato, see the tomato section of Recommended Varieties for the Greenhouse. The key traits are also compared in our Greenhouse Tomato Comparison Chart. -
Hoophouse or high tunnel. Tunnels sit between a greenhouse and the open field. Conditions vary more than in a greenhouse and depend on your latitude, local weather, how open the tunnel is, the season, and how much equipment you use.
For help choosing for this setting, see our list of the Top-15 Tomatoes for Hoophouse & High Tunnel Production , put together to guide variety choice for tunnels.
Outdoor Culture.
If you grow outside, whether in a field, backyard bed, raised bed, container, balcony, patio or rooftop, look at the variety's days to maturity (DTM). Work out when to start seedlings indoors based on your season length and the DTM, so you know whether the variety has time to grow, ripen and produce before the season ends.Outdoors it's also important to choose varieties with resistance to the diseases common in your region.
Wherever you grow, look for the symbols showing growth habit and other key details as you browse our tomatoes. Each product page lists days to maturity, disease resistance, germination, growing, harvest and processing details, and more.
3. Fruit • Choose by the qualities you most desire
What everyone wants in a tomato, flavor , is exactly what the typical supermarket tomato often lacks. For a long time growers, shippers, stores and restaurants traded taste for toughness: fruit that could withstand disease, rough handling and a long trip to the plate. That has started to change, and shoppers now have better choices, but a truly great homegrown or farm-stand tomato is still something special.
Taste in color, flavor and texture is very personal, so no tomato pleases everyone. We'll go deeper into flavor and texture below, but here are a few general points to start with.
Helpful Rules Of Thumb
- Color. Yellow and orange tomatoes usually taste milder and less acidic than red or pink ones.
- Texture. Some people like the softer, juicier texture typical of heirlooms; others want the firm flesh typical of greenhouse and determinate types.
- Yield. Yield matters to most growers, so it's worth comparing marketable and unmarketable yield along with flavor and texture when you judge a variety.
Flavor may come first, but many other traits decide whether a tomato succeeds: days to maturity, habit, size, shape, color, vigor, pest and disease resistance, yield, cracking, blemishes and shelf life, among others. With so many criteria, it helps to know which ones matter most to you.
Online Product Filters
Those three questions settle most tomato decisions. Still, other considerations may matter to you or your buyers. You may want only organic tomatoes or only open-pollinated tomatoes, for instance. The filters on our tomato listings make it easy to narrow the list to your priorities.
Still undecided? Here are some suggestions.
Which Is the Best Tomato? Our Top-5 Recommendations
Want the best tomato in a certain category? The filters on our tomato listings let you sort varieties by your own methods, needs and preferences. If you'd like a starting point, here are some picks for flavor, sweetness, meatiness, disease resistance, and for that simple test of a good summer garden, the tomato sandwich. None of these choices is clear-cut, but we hope the suggestions help.
1 • Which tomatoes have the best flavor?
Tomato flavor is complicated, which is one reason it's hard to breed tastier varieties. It comes from a blend of sugars and acids plus several hundred aroma compounds, combined with harder-to-measure qualities like mouthfeel and appearance.
Flavor also shifts considerably depending on where the plant grew, and on how and when — factors that influence atmospheric, light, and mineral exposure. And while it's beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the tomato's organoleptic properties (how it tastes and smells), but flavor differs from plant to plant within a variety and even from fruit to fruit on one plant. Small wonder that flavor, like taste in general, is so personal.
Still, everyone has favorites, and for tomato lovers that's half the fun. Three varieties known for full, balanced flavor:
- 'Cherokee Purple': organic heirloom known for deep, rich flavor and texture.
- 'Celebrity Plus': semi-determinate valued for flavor and wide adaptability.
- 'Big Beef': beefsteak that balances size, taste and earliness.
2 • What is the sweetest tomato to grow?
For many people, sweeter means better, and not only in the West. At some Chinese night markets you can order a plate of thin tomato slices piled with sugar, and sugar-glazed cherry tomatoes on skewers are a popular snack in China, which grows far more tomatoes than any other country (according to the Food & Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database).
Tomatoes contain good amounts of the main sugars fructose and glucose, and like many fruiting crops they tend to trade size for sugar: the sweetest tomatoes are usually small ones. Most eaters happily accept a smaller fruit if it tastes great. Several popular sweet varieties illustrate the pattern:
- 'Supersweet 100': a much-loved red cherry, and the name says it all.
- 'Sun Gold': a very sweet, fruity orange cherry and a longtime favorite with gardeners.
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'Citrine': tangerine-orange cherry with very sweet flavor, bred to crack less than 'Sun Gold'.
3 • Which are the meatiest tomatoes?
It's a fair question, since few variety descriptions these days call a tomato not "meaty," which makes the meatiest ones hard to identify. Meatiness is also hard to measure. Here's what actually creates a tomato's texture.
First, some terms. Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. Most varieties have 4 or 5 seed cavities, called locules, as in the diagram, while most cherry types have 2.
Botanically the fruit is a berry, and its fleshiness, or meatiness, comes from the tissue called the pericarp and the placental tissue around the locules.
As the fruit ripens, genetics and growing conditions drive many chemical changes. Enzymes break down cell walls and soften the flesh, and the tissue surrounding the seeds turns jelly-like. At maturity the fruit dehisces, separating from its pedicel, or stem.
The texture you notice when you slice and bite a tomato reflects the variety's genetics and the conditions it grew in. It also depends on how long it has been since the fruit was at its peak, if it ever got there, and how it was handled in between.
Tasters call this texture mouth feel. Opinions on ideal mouthfeel vary as much as everything else about tomatoes, so naming the "meatiest" is hard. Encouragingly, researchers are making progress in a little-known field called acoustic tribology. Trying to put numbers on mouthfeel, they suggest that how we sense a food's texture is linked to how it sounds on the tongue. Or, in the words of a headline from Smithsonian Magazine, To Measure the Taste of Food, Listen to Your Taste Buds.
That's plenty about mouthfeel; here are our picks for meatiest.
- Heirloom / open-pollinated (OP): 'Blue Beech' is a notably meaty paste heirloom with plenty more to recommend it. It and two related open-pollinated amicasare described in more detail, including their history and their suitability for short seasons and low-input growing, in Open-Pollinated Revival Project: 3 Resurrected Heirloom & Heritage Tomato Varieties.
- Greenhouse: For hybrids, the French heritage hylooms stand out for meatiness. Bred in Provence, these varieties marry the best of the Old World with the New, combining heirloom-style eating with disease resistance. They can need a bit more attention and do best with long days, but they repay the effort. The standout is the oxheart 'Cauralina' , which is meaty through and through.
4 • Which are the best disease-resistant tomatoes?
Which diseases you need to guard against depends on where you grow. Indoors, outdoors or in between, environment is one side of the host–pathogen–environment triangle.
For an introduction to the most common problems, see our overview of Common Tomato Pests, Diseases & Physiological Disorders. It also covers several physiological disorders caused by growing conditions that can affect a tomato's look, texture and taste.
Learn which pests and diseases are common where you live. If they concern you, use the resistance filters on our tomato pages and check each variety's resistance codes. Careful variety choice plus good growing practices will lower disease pressure.
With that in mind, here are some varieties with broad disease resistance.
Disease-Resistant Indeterminates
- Beefsteak: 'Big Beef' and 'Geronimo'
- Slicer: 'Rebelski' and 'Beorange'
- Cocktail: 'Mountain Magic'
- Cherry: 'Favorita'
- Roma: 'Granadero'
Disease-Resistant Determinates
- Beefsteak: 'Grand Marshall', and 'Galahad'
- Slicer: 'Mountain Merit' and 'Defiant PhR'
- Cherry: 'Edox,' 'Cherry Bomb,' and 'Sakura'
- Plum: 'Plum Regal'
5 • What is the best sandwich tomato?
For the ultimate tomato sandwich, beefsteaks are the obvious choice. These three make the cut.
- Easy AAS winner: 'Big Beef.' This indeterminate hybrid won an All-America Selections award in 1994 for pairing old-fashioned flavor with modern hybrid vigor, disease resistance and yield. It starts bearing early and keeps going until a killing frost, and it's easy enough for beginners.
- Heirloom: 'Brandywine.' This heirloom slicer tastes so good it works for a plain tomato sandwich or a fully loaded burger. The Quisenberry strain is named for Ben T. Quisenberry (1887–1986), who helped preserve and share the seed.
- Greenhouse / hyloom: 'GinFiz' is a flat-round French beefsteak with sweet-tart golden flesh streaked with red. It offers strong disease resistance for greenhouse and tunnel growing, sets and ripens early, and resists shoulder cracking. Ideal on an open-faced crostini.
Learn More
- Tomatoes • Greenhouse Tomato Varieties (comparison chart, PDF)
- Tomatoes • Heirloom Tomato Varieties (comparison chart, PDF)
- Tomatoes • Indeterminate Tomato Varieties (comparison chart, PDF)
- Tomatoes • Paste, Plum & Roma Tomato Varieties (comparison chart, PDF)
- Tomatoes • Key Growing Information
- Greenhouse Tomatoes • Key Growing Information
