Tomato Town

OO22 Tomato Seeds

All OO22 tomato seeds are open pollinated. Tomato flowers are mostly self-pollinating, so you can save seeds from the fruit you grow and get the same type of tomatoes next year with relative reliability. You can't do this with hybrid tomatoes varieties.

Paste Tomatoes 🍅

These are sauce tomatoes! Simmer large quantities down and then freeze or can. Add herbs, onions, and garlic. Use a recipe if you haven’t made big batches of sauce before. These tomatoes are also good for grilling fresh, because they aren’t super juicy; they won’t fall apart as much as a classic heirloom slicer. I recommend halving lengthwise; the rest is up to the grill master!

Gilberte Paste 2 Packs to Share ~ 20 seeds

These elongated tomatoes have a pointy tip, and “green shoulders” when ripe. The tip on this year's batch is particularly pointy and seperate from the body of the fruit. Although a few of these got blossom end rot, they seemed less suseptible to this unfortunate circumstance than any other paste tomatoes I attempted to grow this year.

Purple Paste 3 packs to Share ~ 20 seeds

These rich and dark paste tomatoes originally came to me as a "Purple Russian" free seed pack from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I've had trouble getting these to grow successfully and consistently, but I've kept them going for a few years now. They aren't very productive plants. My strain is either going to get better, or get lost.

Slicer Tomatoes 🍅

Eat them while they are fresh! Eating any of these varieties fresh is a true sign of peak summer. Great for sandwiches and beyond! When I have more than I can eat fresh, I freeze them whole to throw in fall soups, stews, and roasts.

Mortage Lifter 4 Packs to Share ~ 30 seeds

To be honest, these might not be Mortage Lifter tomatoes. See, it's sort of hard to tell big fat beautiful red heirloom tomatoes apart sometimes. I've grown Mortage Lifter, Moskvitch, and Fat Pinko (which I named circa 2014 from an actual heirloom variety I didn't keep track of) side by side without meticulous record keeping. So, this is a sort of "best in class" selection process from multiple potential origins.

Orange Peach 6 Packs to Share ~ 30 seeds

Small for a "slicer", these tomatoes are orange and fuzzy. Yes, fuzzy like a peach. I love these tomatoes because they are delicious, prolific, hardy plants. One Orange Peach tomato is the perfect size to start and finish by yourself in a single meal. They have a low water content, so they store very well. Orange peach tomatoes are always the last fresh tomatoes I eat in the fall. I lay them flat on a cotton towel, in a single layer on a flat basket, in the fridge; they last like this for weeks longer than other tomatoes. I have my friend Julia to thank for these, she gave me her extra seeds about 7 or 8 years ago, and I have been loving and saving them ever since.

Sauna Flame 4 Packs to Share ~ 20 seeds

Once upon an early fall sauna night, my friend Brenin brought one of the most striking tomatoes I had ever seen to the potluck. If I recall correctly, he haden't grown it himself, but it had been grown locally (to Traverse City). This tomato was so spectacular, I had to add it to my collection! I gutted and grabbed the seeds, right before the flesh got tossed into the dinner salad. This was in 2018 or 2019, I think. I've been growing this tomato out every year since. These juicy slicers are a tie-dye of dark purple & orange on the outside, with yellow & pink on the inside. These pics are from a few years ago. I've been growing them out to be mid-sized, well rounded, less blemished fruits.

Cherry Tomatoes 🍅

Cherry tomatoes are the BEST for fresh tomato salads in the summer! Depending on the size, I either 1/2 of 1/4 them, toss with other vegetables (or not) and dress as desired.

Schoolyard Mix 11 Packs to Share ~ 50 seeds

BIG packs of all many different cherry tomatoes listed here. You'll have enough seeds to spill some, kill some, share some, and care for some. Perfect for school gardens!

TC Red Cherry 4 Packs to Share ~ 30 seeds

This is a classic, delicious, prolific, bright red, beautiful, huge cherry tomato. I don’t remember what variety of heirloom I originally started saving this strain from, so renamed it to reflect what is is, and where I grow it. These tomatoes are delicious, but a little seedy... making them the pefect tomato to grow for seed sharing at school gardens, demonstration sites, and other community garden projects. Blight reported from test growers.

I am selecting for the following fruit traits:

Big! The bigger the better (to a point I have not reached yet.)
An attached sepal (because I think that looks cute).
Perfectly consistent red color
Flawless fruit in terms of blemishes, shape, and splitting.

Yellow Gem 2 Packs to Share ~ 20 seeds

Cute! Just for fun, I'm favoring small fruit in my selection process for this strain. I saved these from a plant my beau brought home from Oryana when I asked him to fill in my cherry tomato rainbow during his grocery store shopping run in spring of 2018. No idea what the original variety was. I've grown out 4 generations now!

Pink Pearl 2 Packs to Share ~ 30 seeds

These shiny, elongated fruit are large for a cherry. Even though I haven't been going for a large size, these ones are creeping to be bigger than the TC Red Cherry. Maybe over the next decade I'll work this into a new paste strain, as they are drier and larger than other cherries.

Additional Varieties 🍅

Keeping track of some tomato strains I am not sharing this year.

Orange Marble & Red Marble

I got two new cherry tomatoes coming on the scene for 2023! I was walking around my hood, and saw these two tomato plants coming out of my neighbors compost pile through the fence in the corner of their yard. They tasted really good and were pretty too, so I'm going to grow them out and see what happens! Both are small tomatoes with absolutely bueatiful coloration. They weren't super seedy, which is good for eating!

Fat Pinko

Only about 14 seeds... this very old strain is getting some special attention in 2023.

Black Vernisssage

Seeds saved in 2021 I believe. This one came as a free packet from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. It never had much flavor or impresive qualities, really. Maybe I'll let it go. Maybe not.

Purple Heart

These are big, early, deeply rich fruit. I'm not sure if they are Prudens Purple, or Purple Cherokee, or some other open pollinated purple tomato. I've been saving and growing and saving and growing these for a long time. I haven't had them go impressively berserk in a while, but they keep being good enough to hang on in my ever evolving heiroloom tomato collection. I'm currently selecting for an uneven, heirloom shape.

Peach Cherry

I'm saving seeds from this tomato that is small, but it is on a tiny but mighty volunteer plant, where tomatoes have had a hard time growing in the past. So I'm curious what this extra-hardy, clearly parented by an Orange Peach tomato DNA does, when given the chance.

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