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Ah, the flavor of vine-ripened tomatoes! Life without them is unimaginable. Like peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, they belong to the nightshade family. The thousands of varieties we have today began by crossing various wild specimens over the past two millenia. As a nightshade, tomatoes were first considered to be poisonous and served as decorative plants in Europe. Luckily, someone tasted a fruit and survived to tell others how delicious they were.
Today, tomatoes are the most popular garden crop and an important food staple that is grown across the globe. According to the Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations, China is the largest producer; Statista documents around 68 million metric tons in 2022, up from 50 million in 2012. Buying an Italian brand of tomato sauce is no longer a guarantee that the tomatoes are Italian. Scandals regarding labelling of sources in such products made headlines in December 2024 in Europe.
With over 10,000 varieties of tomatoes in the world and countless regional recipes, it’s impossible to do an exhaustive Deep Dive on Solanum lycopersicum,. My goal here is to share my favorites, how I grow them, how I enjoy them and share a bit of first-hand experience in tomato breeding.
Growing tomatoes
One of the best nurserywomen I know, Daniela Glos, whose tomato plants are incredibly robust and healthy, once said, “Anyone can grow tomatoes.” She’s right. And she’s not. Tomatoes generally germinate easily, grow quickly, and reward us with the most incredible flavors in summer. Starting them as transplants is the challenging part. Too much warmth and too little light leads to leggy seedlings that rarely overcome their weak start. Leggy seedlings are especially common when the enthusiasm for starting transplants overrides our patience and we start too early. There is no advantage to an early start, unless you’re selling transplants and want them to be deceptively big for an early plant sale - and then, I would argue, it’s questionable practice.
Daniela grows her transplants in the most challenging conditions imaginable. Her nursery is small and located at 1250 m / 4100 ft. in the Tyrolean Alps, down the mountain from the well-know ski resort St. Anton. She starts peppers in late January, before the sun has reappeared from behind the mountains. Tomatoes are sown in late February, while the snowbanks around the nursery start to melt on mild days. All of this happens without artificial light.
