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Trusty tomatoes top my list
I’m setting the stage now for the summer vegetable garden by picking out which tomato varieties I plan to grow from seed. As I look through seed catalogs and Web sites, I’m inundated with choices. I can have my pick of colors — red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, green and even striped. I can choose sizes that start out as small as a currant and go up to as large as a small melon. Would I like heirloom tomato varieties or new hybrid varieties? How about disease resistance and indeterminate versus determinate vines?
After browsing through a few catalogs, the list of tomato varieties I want to grow gets longer and longer. Somehow before I actually place my seed orders, I’ll manage to get the list down to a reasonable number for my garden.
At the top of my list of tomatoes to grow from seed this year is a variety called Trusty, which is available through the Bloomington, Ind.,-based seed company, Nature’s Crossroads (www.naturescrossroads.com). According to their Web site, Trusty is an heirloom tomato grown for 70 years in Morgan county by a gentleman named Emory Trusty, who gave Nature’s Crossroads the seed to continue to grow and sell. It’s a beefsteak type tomato, which means it should be excellent for slicing.
All that is good to know about this tomato, but what makes this variety appealing to me is that it was locally bred, so it is more likely to be well suited to the kinds of summers we have around here.
Of course, while I was browsing Nature’s Crossroads’ Web site, I found a few other tomatoes I decided I couldn’t garden without, including Purple Calabash, a big, dark purple tomato; Stupice, an early, prolific tomato; and Gardeners Delight, a small red cherry tomato, the kind that is perfect for snacking on right off the vine.
With these four varieties at the top of my list, I have a feeling it is going to be a great summer for tomatoes.
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