Favorite red tomatoes?

[HappyGardener23]

I tend to love colorful, splashy, and unique tomatoes. As a consequence, I often realize too late in the season that I have neglected to plant many (or any) red tomatoes. As I plan for this season, I'm curious to know which red tomatoes are among your favorites/must-grows.

[Gardenboy]

Red Barn & Aker's West Virginia !!( I like more acidic than sweet)

[FarmerShawn]

Wes is my favorite red heart. Druzba is my favorite round red slicer. Opalka is my favorite red long, skinny one. Juliet is my favorite red salsa ingredient. Big Beef and Big Boy are my favorite red beefsteaks.

[Labradors2]

Bulgarian Triumph is a fabulous, tasty, compact saladette with perfect round orbs.

Linda

[hl2601]

I second Bulgarian Triumph. I also like Thessaloniki because it is a heavy producer of very uniform sized reds. Good for salad and salsa. Not the juice down your chin type tho!

[AKmark]

Chapman is very good for a large beefsteak, Delicious can be very good, Red Barn is unique and good. For an earlier smaller tomato get some Mat-Su Express from Ted's seed shop, some of those can have outstanding old fashioned tomato flavor. Matina is a flavorful early tomato too, as well as Fourth of July hybrid.

[Koala Doug]

Currently, my personal favorite 'red' tomato is OTV Brandywine.

[pipefitter508]

Bodacious big red beef steak excellent flavor very productive and a long keeper
One of my best for my vegetable stand
Bob

[Tormato]

You're not missing much, with most red varieties.

I'll "third" Bulgarian Triumph. A few others that I like are Neves Azorean Red, Shuntukski Velican, Mat-Su Express, and Bacon Lettuce and This, for beefsteaks. Most red hearts (too numerous to name) are also very good.

But, to me, there are 100+ pink varieties that taste great, to every red variety that tastes great.

[VirginiaClay]

Better Boy for me. It's a truly excellent, delicious tomato, and a reliable, disease-resistant, heavy producer here in northern Virginia. We also grow Big Boy, Big Beef and Parks Whopper for all-purpose red tomatoes. They're all very good and I'd recommend any of them, but Better Boy is our favorite.

I agree with the recommendation of Fourth of July hybrid for an early red tomato. They're small but flavorful, produce a ton, hold up to foliage disease very well, and tend to be perfectly round, blemish-free, and beautiful. The only negative for me besides the small size is that they have a high percentage of gel and seeds.

I grew Neves Azorean Red last year and enjoyed the few tomatoes I got, but I was disappointed to only get four or five usable tomatoes off the plant before it succumbed to early blight and septoria. I'll try it again another year to see if it does better in different weather (we had a wet year).

[Fusion_power]

There are several very good red tomatoes though they tend to have more robust flavor than pink varieties. For a large slicer, I enjoy Cuostralee, Neves Azorean Red, Nepal, and Akers West Virginia. For an early variety, Bloody Butcher is hard to beat. The cherry tomato, Lorelei, I released last fall is a superbly flavored cherry though Camp Joy is nearly as good.

Others that have plenty of flavor are Red Brandywine, Andrew Rahart's Jumbo Red, Picardy (superb canner), Piennolo, Reif's Red Heart, and Wisconsin 55 (short season climates), Frank's Large Red, and Bisignano #2. Some of these are canners, some slicers, some for storage, and some have other uses.


If you insist on a hybrid, Ramapo and Big Beef are my standard varieties.

[nctomatoman]

Nepal, Aker's West Virginia, Andrew Rahart's Jumbo Red, Large Lucky Red (a selection from Lucky Cross, so there is Brandywine in them thar genes!), OTV Brandywine and from our dwarf project, Sweet Scarlet Dwarf (really superb flavor). I like Red Brandywine and Druzba very much, but they are a touch below the previous ones. Though I've not grown it in many years, I remember being very fond of both German Red Strawberry and Zogola.

Some very recent dwarf project releases that really impressed my first time growing them are Sarah's Red, Maura's Cardinal, and Hannah's Prize (nice work by Idahowoman on those three).

In general, I probably have less red (as in scarlet - red flesh, yellow skin) tomatoes in my gardens each year...and seem to find various pink, purple, chocolate, green and yellow tomatoes to love.

[MrBig46]

Start F1. Don't take it as an advertisement, it's just my answer to the question asked.
Vladimír

[Milan HP]

I second Start F1 wholeheartedly. Nothing can beat a slice of freshly baked Šumava bread with butter and a few Start tomatoes. Nevertheless, I have heard so much praise for Bulgarian Triumph that I can't wait for trying it.

Milan HP

[nctomatoman]

If I were to add F1 hybrids to my list, from memory, it would be Better Boy and Whopper. Big Beef to me is overrated. I don't grow commercial F1s typically because they fall outside of my desire to save and share seeds.

I did create quite a few heirloom indeterminate X heirloom indeterminate F1s last year and will grow them this year - it will make for an interesting garden, seeing how they combine.