Tomatoes come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and unique varieties like the Blue Berry Dessert Tomato are a great way to add some excitement to your garden. These tomatoes are not only visually stunning but also bring unique flavors to the table.
For instance, Blue Berry Dessert Tomatoes stand out with their purple-blue hues and sweet taste. They’re perfect for fresh eating or adding a pop of color to salads. Growing these or other unique varieties can be rewarding and fun.
What’s your favorite unique tomato variety? Have you grown anything unusual this season? Let’s share our experiences and tips!
In our family garden we had over a dozen varieties growing this last season. Some were the typical red colors, and one variety ended up being gigantic.Maybe a “Beefsteak” variety? Im not sure. The flavor was good, but not the best of the bunch.
Some tomatoes were the cherry kind. A yellow one that was the shape of a large grape, some smaller reddish-orange colored ones, and possibly a more wild variety that was very small, but delicious.
Some were medium sized and "“Roma” shaped reds. Some were larger and very ridged.
We didn’t have anything the purple spectrum, though.
The most exciting one for me from a landracing perspective was a small-medium sized orange color tomato that was not only one of the best flavored, but also the last remaining survivor after getting hit with very cold and wet conditions. It was very exposed out in the open. All other tomatoes in the garden got taken out by blight, except for this one. It still stood strong after everything else was dead or dying, and even made it past 1 degree C temperatures and light early morning frost. It finally succombed after a couple consecutive nights of 0 - -1 temps.
At this stage in the game this is what im really hoping to select for. The hardiness, disease and pest resistance, and ability to push past barriers. Flavor selections and pretty colors will come later on.
One of my favorites is the chocolate sprinkle cherry tomato. It’s kind of streaky green and brown/red and very sweet. Even though it’s a F1 hybrid, I still collected the seeds and they grew nicely, very close to the original hybrid.
I like anything unusual but i have yet to encounter a tomato that i like better than the Sungold cherry tomato. And even with that variety I have discovered that location matters. One plant growing in one spot produced the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. Way better than other Sungolds I grew elsewhere.
I’ve got about 500 tomatoes in my seed inventory now, and about 125 of those are my own crosses. So, I guess I grow unique tomatoes every year. Some highlights might include what I would term best flavor green when ripes which I think included Dwarf Saucy Mary, Dwarf Kelly Green, and my favorite: Tom Wagner’s Muddy Waters which also has stripes and antho skin. I think a couple of segregates of a cross between one of my blue bicolors and Brad’s Atomic Grape also had that best green flavor. I suspect more of the green’s have the same best flavor for gardener’s in other areas of the country/world. The other green’s I tried weren’t as good.
I also like Sungold F1, Dwarf Eagle Smiley, Coyote, Amethyst Cream, Black Cherry, and Dwarf Gloria’s Treat for flavor. I think it takes a fairly early tomato to get into the best flavor group in my MT garden because it has to get ripe during the dry season and before the nights start to cool off. I have a segregating population of Joseph Lofthouse’s promiscuous tomato project I have been trying to select for best flavor- but I think I’ve allowed them to cross with others so the last few years have had new surprises in that population. This year’s surprise was an antho potato leaf dwarf in that population- a couple actually but one of them had the best flavor of the year amongst them.
I really like Sweet Cherriette for its earliness. I’ve got some cross descendants of it now.
I am fascinated by Solanum habrochaites for the incredible vigor of hybrids with it. It’s difficult to work with though in terms of flavor recovery.
I’ve been enjoying making some crosses with wild currant tomatoes the last few years. Plants are vigorous and the crosses are easier to work with than Solanum habrochaites crosses.
True Solanum galapagense has tiny incredibly hairy orange fruits which is fascinating, and I grow it almost every year- but with limited success making crosses with it. I did manage a cross between Exserted Orange and something hairy fruited last year though- and I look forward to growing out the F2 next year because I am not quite sure which hairy fruited father it was- I’m hoping it was the galapagense.
I recently grew a variety called, “Fuzzy blue ball”, I found it difficult to grow and it was a scrawny seedling until the summer started to end (started it in March!). It gave me its first ripe fruit a couple of days ago after flowering in September! I brought it inside in October. Taste wise, it was sour but had some sweetness. If it ripened in the summer, it might have been sweeter! Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to growing it again.
Was it a red antho or other colored? Since I’m traveling for work most months the year, I’m growing in my travel trailer. I asked because I ordered a couple yellow and yellow / black dwarves from Victory, but still looking for others.
It was my ideal a yellow or a bicolor which is yellow with a bit of red marbling.
However- it is an interesting segregant, but I still need to grow it again at least one more time before I should share it as that. It should be easier to stabilize because all uncrossed seedlings should likely be both potato leaf and rugose dwarf. Therefore, I should be able to grow out the saved seed and reject any seedlings that aren’t dwarf potato leaves. Then amongst the adult plants reject any that end up with red fruits or lack anthocyanin. Then I should have something moderately stable- though the anthocyanin will take longest to truly stabilize and that might not be confident till the F7 which is slightly complicated because I am not precisely certain what filial generation these are since the last cross, but I think at least F2 which for me could mean five more years of isolated growing for true stability. I might share in the F4 next year (2026) if this year goes well- but with the caveat that the anthocyanin will probably not yet be stable.
Thats the optimistic scenario in an isolation garden. In a mixed garden I’m not sure if this population will ever stabilize- which would also be interesting as it would indicate at least some success for Joseph’s efforts! It would be interesting to grow it in a mixed garden as well as an isolation garden because the resulting seeds from it from a mixed garden would easily show their outcrossing rate because any regular leaf or non-dwarf seedlings would be F1 hybrids with it.
Any off types from the 2024 seed grown in 2025 are going to be F1 hybrids with the other segregants in the same isolation garden in 2024. It will be interesting to see what percentage of them are regular leaf or non-dwarf.
Those in this photo are some of our favorites. The big yellow ones are Willard Wynn, an Appalachian Beefsteak heirloom. The ones on top with the dark tops are Cherokee Purple. The pink ones on bottom are Hoosier Rose, it showed up as a segregation from a commercial tomato, I’ve shared it some, but it is mostly unique to my garden. The smaller yellow ones on top are a mystery. The heart shape ones are Hoosier Heart, formerly Utah Heart, they came to me through Joseph Lofthouse.
These are a mix of cherry tomatoes that descended from a random cross with my currant tomatoes several years ago. They are all good, but some are extremely good. The small yellow ones are fantastic. This photo shows maybe 1/2 of the total phenotypes and they keep coming. This photo is from 2023, two even better than any of these showed up in 2024.
