Deciding which tomatoes to grow can be tough. You have to balance flavor with a plant’s ability to resist the diseases common in your area. You have decide whether you want open pollinated or hybrid, cherry or slicing, heirloom or modern. Finally, you have to decide whether to get a determinate versus indeterminate tomato plant.
A determinate plant grows so big then stops growing. It blooms all at once and has fruit all at once. All the tomatoes on the plant get ripe within a few days of one another. This is helpful if you are going to can the tomatoes or make sauce from them. It doesn’t work so well if you want fresh tomatoes to eat, as you get too many to use and then nothing.
Indeterminate plants continue to grow throughout the season. They need to be caged or staked to help support them. These plants continue to bear fruit throughout the season. This means you get fewer fruit at one time, but have some tomatoes for longer than you would with a determinate plant. However, when it reaches 90 degrees F for a week or more at night, tomatoes will stop setting fruit, although they still bloom.
Some of both. There are tomatoes that have some characteristics of both indeterminate and determinate plants. They are bushy and the plant doesn’t grow a a lot but has fruit for a longer time. They may work for gardeners who don’t have much room, but want lots of tomatoes across the season.
Whether a tomato is determinate or indeterminate is an important factor in choosing a tomato cultivar to plant. It is, however, only one factor. You can read about some of the others below.
Related articles:
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
I grew some of these as a kid and they were great.