Know your Tomatoes

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), also called the love apple, is a herbaceous, usually sprawling plant in the nightshade family widely cultivated for its edible fruit.
Savoury in flavour, the fruit of most varieties ripens to a distinctive red colour.

Know your Tomatoes - Botany

Tomato plants typically reach to 1–3 metres (3–10 ft) in height and have a weak, woody stem that often vines over other plants.
The leaves are 10–25 centimetres (4–10 in) long, odd pinnate, with 5–9 leaflets on petioles, each leaflet up to 8 centimetres (3 in) long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular-hairy.
The flowers are 1–2 centimetres (0.4–0.8 in) across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of 3–12 together.
It is a perennial, often grown outdoors in temperate climates as an annual.

Determinate tomatoes, or "bush" tomatoes, are varieties that grow to a compact height (generally 3 - 4').
Determinates stop growing when fruit sets on the top bud.
All the tomatoes from the plant ripen at approximately the same time (usually over period of 1- 2 weeks).
They require a limited amount of staking for support and are perfectly suited for container planting.

Indeterminate tomatoes will grow and produce fruit until killed by frost.
They can reach heights of up to 12 feet although 6 feet is normal.
Indeterminates will bloom, set new fruit and ripen fruit all at the same time throughout the season.
They require substantial staking for support and benefit from being constrained to a central growing stem.

If you have a large garden, and would like heavy crops of tomatoes at certain points in the season, you might want to plan for several determinate varieties.
You would look for two basic pieces of information in the plant catalog or on the plant label when making this decision.
Look for the word "determinate" or the abbreviation "DET" so you know what you're dealing with.
Next, look for the number of days at which the plant will set fruit.

Growing to preserve

To get several nice harvests, try to combine determinate varieties that bear early, mid, and late season crops.
If you are into canning, saucing, or drying your tomatoes, this is probably the best way to go.

Growing for immediate consumption

If you want tomatoes for the course of the season for snacking and adding to salads and sandwiches, it is best to go with indeterminate varieties.
Several types of indeterminate tomatoes are very prolific, and a plant or two will more than suffice to meet your needs.

Many favorite heirloom tomatoes are indeterminate varieties.
The majority of tomato varieties are indeterminate including most heirlooms and most cherry types.
Other indeterminate tomatoes include: 'Beafsteak', 'Big Boy' and 'Brandywine'.
Early producing varieties like, 'Celebrity' and 'Early Girl', are also indeterminate.
However since they tend to mature earlier and die back before the end of the season, they are sometimes labeled semi-determinate.

Many paste or roma tomatoes are determinate varieties.
Some others bred to be determinate include: San Marzano (see left), Celebrity, Marglobe and Rutgers.
Growing determinate variety tomatoes makes good sense when you want a large amount of tomatoes all at one time, to make tomato sauce for example.

If you want to grow in containers, you'll probably want to stick with a few different determinate varieties.
They are more well-behaved and better suited to container culture.
You can certainly grow indeterminate tomatoes in containers, but be prepared to be vigilant about staking or caging, as well as pruning the suckers to maintain compact growth.