by: Dorothy Suding
As early as nine years old, I had already found out that the best tomato is a home grown tomato. Pretty sharp for a young girl, considering most kids won't eat a tomato unless its mashed up into spaghetti sauce or cleverly disguised underneath the salad dressing. My mother was very big on eating lots of vegetables and my father enjoyed mixing up his fruit and vegetable garden in amongst his other shrubs and trees. It was a natural for me to want to grow my own tomatoes when I grew up.
When I got older, I married a man in the nursery industry. He had a keen sense of how to grow just about anything, tomatoes being one of them. When he grew a tomato plant, he really grew a tomato plant. Our harvests from four plants were enough to feed an army. My theory at that time was that two plants were more than enough to feed a family of four, any more than that was pure gluttony.
How naive I was back in those days. I moved out to Indiana and started gardening on my own 1/3-acre plot. Over the past 5 years I've discovered how I had erred in my thinking and that one can never have enough tomatoes. In fact, this past season I grew over 50 tomato plants and I'm proud to say that I didn't share a one of them. All of them were either eaten fresh or thrown into pasta sauce concoctions or pots of spicy chili.
Here is the list of the varieties of Tomatoes that I have grown: