"No Brainer" Tomatoes

By Sue Andersen Berger

Growing tomatoes successfully begins with choosing the right variety!! Enjoy tips from our resident tomato expert, Sue Andersen Berger.

​Everyone’s excited for summer…perfect tomatoes exploding with flavor, enough to share at dinner parties with friends and family...Caprese Salad, Gazpacho, Panzanella Salad to name a few favorite dishes that are so much better with homegrown tomatoes!
 
Growing tomatoes can be so fun and rewarding (when you have perfect growing conditions and time to fuss over them) or more stressful and disappointing (gophers, shade, poor soil).
 
My sympathies especially go out to my tomato-grower friends who live in the Oakland Hills, Berkeley and Alameda.  Cool summers and limited sun are usual for them.  It has become my mission to offer them tomato varieties that would work in their conditions, my “tried and true”, my ‘no brainer’ tomatoes. These are the ones they request year after year for the tomatoes’ dependability and flavor.

​After growing hundreds of tomato varieties, here is my list. These all are very productive, have a short DTM (days to maturity) and taste great! They are mostly cherry and salad/small sized. Next year I will be trialing a few new ones, Bloody Butcher and Sun Sugar, that sound promising as well.​​

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Types of Tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes

• Blue Ambrosia
• Candy Sweet Icicle*
• Cherry Bomb​*

• Esterina
• ​Green Tiger
• Katinka

• Maglia Rosa*
• ​Pink Tiger
• Sugar Drop

* Available at Orchard Nursery last spring. 

Salad/Small Size

• Azoychka*
• Jaune Flamme*
• Karma Peach

• Matina*
• ​Mat Su Express
• Maya & Sion’s Airdrie Classic

• Moravsky Div
• ​Stupice*
• Sweet Tooth

* Available at Orchard Nursery last spring. 

Growing Tips

1. Give them the best sunny spot in the garden or on the deck (6 hours+ of sun per day).
2. Before planting in the ground and in raised beds, amend the soil with organic fertilizer and compost.
3. For containers, use NEW fresh Potting Soil each year.
4. For in the ground and raised beds, water 2 times a week unless there is a heat wave. Containers need to be watered more often.
5. Fertilize with an organic tomato/vegetable fertilizer every 2-3 weeks throughout the summer.  This year I am using Texas Tomato Food (liquid concentrate that needs to be diluted), Tomato Tone, Gardner & Bloome Tomato/ Vegetable Fertilizer.  In my containers, I also use the Jobe’s Organic Vegetable Fertilizer stakes.
6. Companion plantings that survive the summer heat include:
   Lime Thyme, Seashells Cosmos, Verbena, Victoria Blue Salvia and Zinnias.

Favorite Tomato Recipes

Ina Garten's Panzanella Salad
​Alton Brown's Gazpacho
Martha Stewart’s Cherry Tomato, Corn, and Halloumi Salad