Choosing tomato cultivars and hybrids for greenhouse cultivation

You have surely visited seed shops many times and noticed the general trends of this commercial market. You have probably already developed the best tactic for buying seed for your vegetable garden: starting in January-February and managing to visit several retail outlets in time for sowing for transplants. However, it is not that simple.

New cultivars and hybrids of tomatoes appear constantly, and from a psychological perspective alone, they displace the previous ones, and sometimes in quality as well. The issue of choosing cultivars and hybrids remains difficult even for a master of greenhouse cultivation. How to always deal with the best novelties, and how not to lose your favorite old cultivars in the process, which often disappear from sale?

And, by the way, what is better for a hobby gardener, a cultivar or a hybrid? It is generally believed that hybrids are not only more productive, but also healthier, although they lose out slightly in taste to cultivars. Industrialists and farmers have switched to growing hybrids, and imitating them, more and more amateur gardeners grow only hybrids on their plots.

But the advantages of hybrids are exaggerated, and the disadvantages are downplayed. It must be admitted that hybrids are also quite easily affected by late blight and other typical diseases of tomatoes. It must also be admitted that the difference in the harvest mass is not always that obvious. Modern cultivars are also high-yielding; otherwise, no one would bother with them and they would soon disappear from the seed market entirely. Cultivars remain in retail, and the general assortment of tomatoes is huge, making it very difficult for us to choose the best cultivar or hybrid among them.

Regarding taste, there is also no clear boundary, and it is wrong to judge that all hybrids are tasteless, and all cultivars without exception are tasty: cultivars can also have a mediocre taste.

Let’s start with the fact that almost all gardeners plant not just one hybrid or cultivar annually, but several. Some do this for reliability, while others are already well-versed in cultivars and have chosen their favorites based on the principle of contrast:

• one very early, with medium-sized fruits;
• another — later and large-fruited;
• a third — with small fruits for exquisite canning in small jars.

Everyone has their own strategy. Planting 3–4 or even 5–6 different tomatoes is the norm today. And yet, people still rotate them and look for better ones. Why?

What a field day for cultivar testing! Despite the fact that there are hundreds of cultivars and hybrids on sale, there remain few truly good cultivars. And finding them is difficult. This is not like checking the weather on the Internet: you type "best tomato cultivars for a greenhouse" and they are laid out right in front of you. You will only get advertising from interested parties, that’s all.

Friends, at one time I, like any novice gardener, fell for convincing recommendations, for advertising articles about supposedly "unsurpassed, super-productive, most modern, disease-free, etc." tomato novelties. I no longer listen to advertisements, "opinions of experts," or other videos on the Internet, but test everything myself.

Important. Practice shows that, with rare exceptions, a tomato cultivar or hybrid does not turn out to be what is written and promised about it in reality. It is just that everyone has different perceptions, and there is no accounting for taste.

Besides this, the same cultivar may have different quality from different agricultural companies. Also, do not forget that the soil and its composition affect the quality of the fruits and can impair their taste. And the greenhouse itself greenhouse, by making sunlight not quite fully potent, as a rule, slightly impairs the taste compared to tomatoes grown in open ground.

So many reasons for a possible "game of taste"! You never know which cultivar will turn out to be the winner in your conditions. In fact, most cultivars and hybrids are disappointing, and only a few unexpectedly exceed all expectations. As a result, everything turns out to be the opposite: you end up keeping not the most hyped trendy cultivars for permanent cultivation, but a handful of modest, rare ones. (Thus, one of my best cultivars, Strawberry Dessert, is rarely found on sale; Kirzhach is also rare, as is Pink Honey.)

And yet cultivar testing is a powerful thing, and you gradually select a team of the best cultivars or hybrids for your conditions and growing methods. It is desirable that these be cultivars, not hybrids, so that you can later consistently obtain your own seed from the best fruits.

The situation in the seed market today is such that it forces the gardener to switch to their own saved seed. There are no guarantees that all the necessary cultivars or hybrids will be on sale in the spring, and among the novelties, the proportion of mediocre ones is too high.

In general, for understandable reasons, manufacturers strive under various pretexts to discourage customers from growing tomatoes from their own seed — claiming that "nothing will work out for you anyway, so there is no point in amateur attempts." At the same time, the market is seeing the displacement of cultivars by hybrids, from which it is useless to collect seed.

But here are a few reasons why it is advantageous to maintain a reserve stock of your own seed of selected cultivars in greenhouse farming:

Your own tomato seed stock: advantages and harvesting rules

The majority of commercial tomato seed is produced in southern regions. When grown in the Central region, such plants find themselves in unusually harsh conditions and become susceptible to disease. Seed of your own collection has already undergone primary adaptation to the local climate, so the bushes grown from them show high vitality and develop much more reliably.

Harvesting your own seed material also protects the farm from market instability. A favorite cultivar or hybrid can disappear from sale at any moment. Furthermore, agricultural firms often change cultivar types or seed supply sources, which almost always leads to a deterioration in crop characteristics. Your own stocks guarantee predictable results from year to year.

Working with tomatoes from a seed production perspective is easier than with cucumbers or other cucurbit crops. Tomatoes belong to self-pollinating plants, and their seed matures quickly and completely directly inside the fruits. The resulting offspring accurately reproduce the cultivar qualities of the parent plants and even surpass them in resistance to adverse factors.