Greetings fellow gardeners! While many of us have gardens that are covered under a thick blanket of snow at the moment, it’s seed starting time for some vegetables. If you grow tomatoes from seed, maybe you will find this post interesting.
I grow several varieties of tomatoes each year and I must say that the award for Best Production last year went to….Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes! If you read my last post, I touched on this briefly. Today, I’d like to go into more detail on this fantastic tomato plant.
Before we get to that, here’s a peek at my own garden at the moment, under 12 inches of snow, and it feels as if I will never see the soil again.
But back to talking about tomato plants, having grown the Matt’s variety since 2018, last year was the best ever and I suspect it was likely due to two new factors: soil improvements that were made and my super-duper trellis, more on that below. Remember that age-old advice: put the plant in the right place, where it can get the right amount of sunlight, water, and nutrients? It’s true! Those are the main things to provide for your plants. Some other things to keep in mind are protection from pests, appropriate support structures, and any fertilization one wishes to add to the soil.
When growing tomatoes, it is helpful to know if your variety is determinate vs indeterminate. That characteristic refers to the plant’s growth habit. Determinate tomato plants have a more compact structure and grow until they reach a fixed size. They also set all their fruit within a short period of time. This can be helpful if you need a large quantity of tomatoes at one time, such as for canning and storage. Indeterminate tomato plants will grow and produce until they experience a killing frost. The plants get very lengthy and need a strong support structure to vine on. Here is one of my (indeterminate) Matt’s plants from last year, reaching for the sky on a 7 foot trellis:
With that as the background, my tall trellis was instrumental in the success I had with my Matt’s tomatoes. The trellis is 7 feet above ground level and this plant used every bit of that height. The plant was given the space and support it needed to thrive. I ended up harvesting over 400 cherries from one plant! At some point, as it was dwindling in production, I stopped counting. In addition to being a prolific producer, the tomatoes are very flavorful. I ate many a handful right off the vine.
If you’d like to see how we built our trellis, here is link to that post. I also made a short video last year, showing this plant growing on the trellis, here is a link if you missed it last time.
I’m still using the same packet of Matt’s Wild Cherry seeds I purchased from High Mowing Organic Seeds in 2018. I will grow it again this year. My seed packet is getting low, so I will save seeds from the plants this time. Seed saving is fairly new to me and I’d love to be able to keep growing Matt’s tomatoes year after year from my own stock of seeds. If you’ve been ordering seeds anytime over the past 6 to 12 months, you may’ve noticed that many of the seed companies are working hard to keep up their available stock and often, certain varieties are out of stock. When I recently checked, High Mowing was out of stock for the Matt’s seeds. Another reason to really learn seed-saving techniques.
What is your favorite tomato plant? Any standouts in your garden?
Thanks for stopping by!
~Angela, signing off from the Woodland Garden.
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