Weird weather did produce some winners (and a few winter tomatoes)
Rugby tomatoes can be used for sauce, drying or fresh for salads. They can be slightly heart-shaped or rugby-ball-shaped, and have shown to be good producers in the Central Valley lowlands. Kathy Morrison
Huddled indoors on a cold and rainy December day, I can find warmth in thoughts of summer – and tomatoes.
Now is prime time to order seed for next year’s vegetable garden. But what? Should I let 2024’s failures (and a few successes) guide my picks? Or should I give new varieties a try?
Overall, I had a disappointing tomato year due to poor timing. I planted in late April and early May, which proved to be too late. My vines were just hitting their stride in July – the hottest July on record – and got very poor fruit set.
The plants that survived that heat enjoyed our relatively mild August and set some late-season tomatoes. The big surprise? How much my vines grew in late October and November. Massive plants, they still were blooming on Thanksgiving. But the weather got too cold for their green tomatoes to ripen on the vine. I finally pulled the plants shortly before Christmas (with green tomatoes now slowly turning red on the kitchen counter).
My best producers were Rugby (a paste tomato shaped like a rugby ball), Lemon Boy and Chef’s Choice Orange. Coincidentally, those varieties also were among the 2024 stars for garden expert/podcaster Farmer Fred Hoffman and Don Shor of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis.
Hoffman and Shor discussed the 2024 tomato season in depth during a two-part podcast, “2024 Tomato Winners (and Losers),” released Friday (Dec. 27) on Hoffman’s “Garden Basics with Farmer Fred.” They came to some interesting conclusions – heirlooms really do hate high heat, some tomatoes can take a little shade – as well as offered useful tips for more tomato gardening success in 2025.
“It’s really good to do this show (in) December, January, so the people who are getting the seed catalogs and watching them pile up on their desks can start marking some of these varieties,” Shor said. “Some of them, you will have to order yourself. You’re not going to find them in most garden centers.”
Hoffman, who lives and gardens in Folsom, picked his last vine-ripened tomatoes on Dec. 18. They weren’t pretty, but they tasted good on a sandwich, he noted. He had three varieties that kept producing tomatoes into December: Rugby, Principe Borghese and Jet Star.
Principe Borghese is a Shor favorite; small and pointy, it’s a little Italian sauce tomato, available from Rare Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange, among others. Jet Star is a fast-maturing hybrid slicer, similar to Early Girl; it can be found at Tomato Growers Supply Company.
Shor grew 35 varieties in 2024 and kept detailed notes on each. He was especially impressed by Rugby, which can be found at Totally Tomatoes and West Coast Seeds.
“We can’t tout that one highly enough,” Shor said of Rugby. “It’s being marketed as a sauce tomato but I’ve got customers who are slicing it and using it as a regular slicer. It cooks down great. It’s not going to be in garden centers, very likely, unless the buyer or the grower at one of the large local chains is listening. Rugby is one you should definitely put in your program because it's just not that widely known yet. But every year I grow it, every year I sell it and plant it, people rave about it. Yield is great. It takes the heat well, sets very well early as well as late, in my case, at least this year. So it’s a really, really high quality tomato.”
Shor also praised Chef’s Choice Orange for its firm texture – he harvested about 60, including many 1-pounders and a late-season second crop – and Bodacious, a big red slicer that matures early.
Both Hoffman and Shor had luck with Lemon Boy, a sweet yellow, medium-size hybrid. Shor said he stopped counting when his Lemon Boy produced more than 100 fruit. “It just really outperformed everything this year,” Shor said.
To hear more (or read the transcript), go to: https://gardenbasics.net/.
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Food in My Back Yard Series
May 13: Your plants can tell you more than any calendar can
May 6: Maintain soil moisture with mulch for garden success
April 29: What's (already) wrong with my tomato plants?
April 22: Should you stock up on fertilizer? (Yes!)
April 15: Grow culinary herbs in containers
April 8: When to plant summer vegetables
April 1: Don't be fooled by these garden myths
March 25: Fertilizer tips: How to 'feed' your vegetables for healthy growth
March 18: Time to give vegetable seedlings some more space
March 11: Ways to win the fight against weeds
March 4: Potatoes from the garden
Feb. 25: Plant a fruit tree now -- for later
Feb. 18: How to squeeze more food into less space
Feb. 11: When to plant? Consider staggering your transplants
Feb. 4: Starting in seed starting
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Garden Checklist for week of May 18
Get outside early in the morning while temperatures are still cool – and get to work!
* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.
* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.
* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.
* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters. Transplant seedlings for many of the same flowers.
* Plant dahlia tubers.
* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.
* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.
* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.
* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.
* Are birds picking your fruit off trees before it’s ripe? Try hanging strips of aluminum foil on tree branches. The shiny, dangling strips help deter birds from making themselves at home.
* As spring-flowering shrubs finish blooming, give them a little pruning to shape them, removing old and dead wood. Lightly trim azaleas, fuchsias and marguerites for bushier plants.
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