Tomatoes are the subject of 13 posts on the Food Garden Group blog. That is the highest number of all subjects covered on the blog. It tells us how passionate Tasmanians are about growing their own tomatoes.
The Golden Tomato Award is handed out every year to the person who grows the first ripe tomato of the season (with silver and a bronze awards for second and third).
Even if you don't feel like taking part in these Tomato Olympics, there is a lot that can be learnt from those who won the award. For information about who won in previous years and what they did to get there, read on.
In Tasmania most gardeners pick their first ripe tomato in January, but there are things you can do to have ripe tomatoes early. Over the four years that the Food Garden Group has awarded the Golden Tomato Award for the first ripe home-grown tomato, the winners have taught us things that can help you grow early tomatoes too.
In 2016, the first year of the Golden Tomato Award, winner Lian T proved that, if you put a tomato plant in a warm spot, you can – with good care and without the use of a hot house – have your first ripe tomato in Tasmania on December 9. That was impressive. Lian's first ripe tomato was of a cherry variety. Lian lives on Hobart’s " sunny eastern shore" in Lauderdale. Did that given her an advantage? We saw in subsequent years that that was not the case.
In 2017, the second year of the Golden Tomato Award, winner Anna C blitzed all contenders with a ripe tomato on November 22. Anna proved that you can have early ripe tomatoes if you don't live on "the sunny eastern shore", but her win sparked a lot of commentary because the ripe tomato was on a plant that Anna had held over from the previous season! Was it in the spirit of the award? I thought it was an innovative approach worth everyone's consideration!
Most of us were not even aware that in Tasmania tomato plants could be held over from one season to the next. Anna taught us that, if you have a sheltered spot along a sunny north-facing brick wall in Tasmania, you can consider keeping over winter tomato plants that are in good shape at the end of the season. If they survive the winter, they will then begin spring with an established root system and may form flowers and fruit well before the new youngsters on the block.
In 2018, winner Jo C-C came forward with the first ripe tomato of the season on December 6. At the time she wrote, “I bought a cherry tomato plant early, nurtured it, popped it in my hot house, and it has been sickly and gangly ever since, but has produced three ripe tomatoes!”
And right there Jo told us why the tomato plant had gone into flower and fruiting early. The reason was that it was not happy and healthy. When plants and animals are stressed, they produce offspring as soon as they can, so the species lives on. Farmers see it with sheep in drought situations. If you give tomato plants the best of everything, they will grow to great size, and only much later turn to producing any fruit. Our winner in the fourth year of the Golden Tomato Award knew this too!
In this third year of the Golden Tomato Award, Simone T came second on December 9, also with a cherry tomato (a golden nugget), proving that, if you are aiming for early tomatoes, you do that with varieties that produce small tomatoes. The varieties with bigger tomatoes are always later. Many are definitely late-season.
In 2019, retired fruit tree professional Max K had always been away on the mainland in winter, so had never competed in the award. This winter he decided to have a go, with a new approach.
My advice to people about growing tomatoes is always that the earliest sown tomato plant may not produce the first ripe tomato. There is more to it than that. On so many occasions have I seen early sown tomatoes going long and thin and ultimately completely failing because of lack of light, sun and heat. These days, I sow my tomatoes in the first week of September, and that is plenty early for a good tomato crop. It makes what Max K did so interesting.
On June 1 – that is three weeks before the winter solstice – Max K sowed a cold-tolerant early variety of tomato in unheated trays in his hot house. It took three weeks for the seedlings to show above ground.
He then put each seedling in its own small pot, mixing a bit of sulfate of potash in the soil (not too much), kept them moist but not wet with daily applications of water and seaweed solution, and kept his unheated hot house as light and warm as he could. He re-potted them just one more time, adding just a bit of sulfate of potash at that time, but not at any other time.
Max did not let the seedlings grow quickly. To slow down growth, he took out any side shoots that appeared. When the small plants began to form flowers, he also removed the tops of the main stem of the plants. He forced the plants to focus on forming fruit, not growth.
The result was a ripe tomato (with more on the way on the same plant, and more tomato plants not far behind in his hothouse) on October 17, more than a month earlier than the previous best.
The variety that Max K grew is an American heirloom that was originally called sprint but renamed Kotlas (after a city in north-west Russia) when it became clear that another tomato variety had already been named Sprint. Max K bought the Kotlas seeds from Southern Harvest.
I visited Max and we had a look in his hothouse. There was a second Kotlas with ripe fruit (see photo below – the top of its main stem had been removed like with the other Kotlas). Plenty of other tomato varieties were there too, not pruned to the same extent, and with some with small still-green fruit. None were as advanced as the Kotlas plants.
Kotlas is a determinate heirloom variety, a bush tomato. The winning tomato plant is less than a metre high without any side shoots. The pot in which this tomato plant lives is not very big. Not giving his tomato plants too much space and not too much food, played a role in them producing fruit early. The use of a hot house was crucial in this result. To me it shows how valuable it is to food gardeners in Tasmania to have one.
In 2020, Margaret M produced the first ripe tomato on November 8. Spring 2020 had been a period with ample rain and below-average temperatures, so Margaret did a great job producing a ripe tomato this early. About the plant she wrote, “In many respects it's a failure – but I'm still going to submit it for recognition! The plant has really struggled since I potted it up, and I suspect it has a fungal root condition. Nevertheless I am proud of it, as it's still alive and appears to be continuing to ripen its fruit.
“It is a heritage variety, grown from seed that I've been regrowing from for about 30 years. I think it was called tiny tim (but so many tomatoes are). It is a bush variety and has largish cherry tomatoes.
“I sowed a few varieties indoors in mid-July, just to see how they'd go. This one basically ended up growing on our kitchen table by the window and was very happy for a long time, and flowered quite early. I was doing the Science of Gardening course at the time and we had watched a video on 'buzz pollination' of tomatoes. I thought I'd give it a go, using my phone for the buzz, and hand pollinating with a paint brush. I was very excited to see that I had a lot of success with fruit set.
“With the colder weather through spring, I got tired of waiting for the tomatoes to ripen, and as the plant was looking unwell, I just stuck it in its pot in the corner of the greenhouse and ignored it. Today I have deemed it to be ripe enough to pick, so here it is.”
Well done, Margaret, and thanks for making us aware of buzz pollination.
Early croppers
There is no doubt that generally speaking cherry tomato varieties produce earlier than varieties with larger tomatoes, but over the last few hundred years, some heirloom varieties were bred specifically to have tomatoes early.
The great Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens (RTBG) tomato book mentions the following varieties as being early season and cold tolerant: early cascade (American), Florida basket (American), Kotlas (American), imur prior beta (Norwegian), limegreen (American), northern delight (American), rose quartz multiflora (Japanese), Siberian (Russian), silver fir (Russian), stupice (Czech), sweetie (American), swift (Canadian), tiny tim (very early, 45-55 days, American), yellow currant (Australian), yellow honeybee (Australian)
Unfortunately, most of these heirloom varieties are not for sale at nurseries and hardware stores. Some of these early varieties can be purchased at the tomato sale the RTBG holds mid-October every year.
A few final thoughts
There are many ways to grow tomatoes, so have a go, and you too will have delicious tomatoes that you can't buy in the shops.
Max Bahrfeldt started The Food Garden Group in 2011 after retiring from many years of full-time teaching, managing and designing courses for adult education. The aim of the group is to create an active community of Tasmanian food gardeners, who freely share their knowledge, surplus produce, seeds and plants. Meeting other food gardeners face to face is an important part of the group, and through this many food gardeners have found new friends with like-minded interests. Members include beginners, experienced food gardeners, and some horticultural professionals.