Tomato Varieties, Types of Tomatoes, Heirloom Tomatoes (2024)

'Early Girl' (F1 hybrid, Indeterminate, 80 days) is a great tomato for early harvest and northern or cool-summer gardens. It produces clusters of 1½-2” (4-5cm) deep-red fruits with just the right combination of sweetness and true tomato flavor.

Buy 'Early Girl' Seeds (Johnny's Seeds)

‘Big Mama’ (F1 hybrid, Indeterminate, 80 days produces huge (3" x 5"–7 x 13cm), heavy paste tomatoes that make excellent sauce, especially if sliced in half and fire-roasted first.

"Buy 'Big Mama' Seeds (Burpee)

‘San Marzano’ (F1 hybrid, Indeterminate, 85 days, resistant to verticilium and fusarium wilt 1, tobacco mosaic virus, nematodes, and bacterial speck) produces high yields of heavy, 1 ½ x 5” (4 x 12cm) fruits. Vigorous indeterminate plants.

Buy 'San Marzano' Seeds (Burpee)

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Cherry| Salad| Beefsteak| Roma (Paste)| Hybrid vs Heirloom
Growing Tomatoes

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Hybrid vs. Heirloom Tomato Varieties

Hybrid Tomato Varieties are bred for higher yields, disease resistance, ease of harvesting, or—in the worst case—extended shelf life.

Hybrid tomato varieties are crosses between different cultivars, and there’s little chance they’ll produce true to form from saved seeds—they usually revert to one of the parents, or some random combination of traits instead of the ones selected to increase yield and performance.

For decades, plant breeders and seed companies focused on producing tomatoes that work with large-scale, mechanized production. That meant determinate tomatoes, which are easier and more predictable to harvest, but they went a step further and selected for tomatoes with thick skins and less moisture.

The most egregious example is the “12-mile-an-hour” tomato. These “tomatoes” were bred to withstand the impact of the mechanical tomato harvester (12 miles per hour). They’re harvested just as they’re turning pink, and gassed with ethylene gas to give them a reddish color. Unlike any real tomato, these will last for months after harvest.

Such “tomatoes” are easier to harvest and get to market, so they gradually displaced better tomatoes in supermarkets, and consumers came to accept these mealy imposters because they had no other choice.

Fortunately, home gardeners have always had a choice. If a hybrid tasted great or produced prodigiously, they’d plant it, but if it was mealy and bland, they could ask Mrs. Potreli down the street for some seeds for those rambling, tasty tomatoes from her garden.

Heirloom tomato varieties, prized for superior flavor or excellent performance under local conditions, have been passed down through families or from neighbor to neighbor and saved for generations. Heirloom tomato varieties are “open-pollinated”, meaning they’ll reproduce true to form from saved seeds.

These juicy, thin-skinned beauties can’t be shipped long distances, so large-scale tomato farmers—and companies that supply them seed—ignored them. Fortunately, home gardeners and local farmers preserved many from extinction, and thanks to organizations like the Seed Savers Exchange, they’re now more widely available.

When I started growing tomatoes organically, farmers and seed companies were asleep at the switch, and we were losing tomato cultivars at an alarming rate. Planting hybrid tomatoes was considered immoral, a capitulation to agribusiness seed companies.

Now, with the rise of the chef-driven local foods movement and the revitalization of farmers markets and small-scale vegetable farming and gardening, heirloom tomato varieties are avidly pursued, not just preserved.

Some organic gardeners remain heirloom tomato purists, and turn their noses up at the thought of growing hybrid tomato varieties, or hybrid varieties of any vegetable.

I am not among them. I’ve always grown tomatoes in challenging, cool-summer climates, where a limited number of tomatoes will work. If an heirloom variety produces well in my climate, I’m happy to grow it, but I’m just as happy growing a hybrid tomato variety that produces bumper crops of delicious tomatoes.

Recommended Heirloom
Tomato Varieties

These are the heirloom tomato varieties I’ve grown, and can recommend (by type of tomato):

Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes: ‘Black Cherry’

Heirloom Salad Tomatoes: 'Pantano Romanesco', ‘Valencia’, ‘Stupice’, 'Black Zebra', and ‘Green Zebra’.

Heirloom Beefsteak Tomatoes: 'Cherokee Purple', ‘Brandywine Pink’, ‘Caspian Pink’, ‘Costoluto Genovese’, ‘Black Krim’, and ‘Hillbilly’.

Heirloom Paste Tomatoes: 'San Marzano'.

Descriptions of these varieties are found under each type of tomato, above.

Top of Tomato Varieties Page

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Cherry| Salad| Beefsteak| Roma (Paste)| Hybrid vs Heirloom
Growing Tomatoes

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Tomato Varieties| Starting Tomatoes from Seed
Growing Tomatoes| Tomato Hornworms| Other Tomato Pests
Tomato Diseases| Growing Heirloom Tomatoes
Growing Tomatoes in Cool-Summer Gardens

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