Tomato
| Lifespan: | ⌛ | [[Lifespan::short-lived perennial]] |
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| Origin: | ✈ | [[Origin::Mexico to Peru]] |
| Exposure: | ☼ | full sun"full sun" is not in the list (sun, part-sun, shade, unknown) of allowed values for the "Exposure" property. |
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| Water: | ◍ | regular"regular" is not in the list (wet, moist, moderate, dry, less when dormant) of allowed values for the "Water" property. |
| Sunset Zones: | [[Sunset zones::allsn]] |
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Solanum > |
Tomatoes are technically fruits (berries to be exact) that are treated like vegetables. Tomatoes are one of the most common garden vegetables in the United States and, along with zucchini, have a reputation for outproducing the needs of the grower. Plants typically grow to 1–3 m in height, with a weak, woody stem that usually scrambles over other plants. The leaves are 10–25 cm long, pinnate, with 5–9 leaflets, each leaflet up to 8 cm long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular-hairy. The flowers are 1–2 cm across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of 3–12 together.
The tomato is now grown worldwide for its edible fruits, with thousands of cultivars having been selected with varying fruit types, and for optimum growth in differing growing conditions. Cultivated tomatoes vary in size from cherry tomatoes, about the same 1–2 cm size as the wild tomato, up to beefsteak tomatoes 10 cm or more in diameter. The most widely grown commercial tomatoes tend to be in the 5–6 cm diameter range. Most cultivars produce red fruit; but a number of cultivars with yellow, orange, pink, purple, green, or white fruit are also available. Multicolored and striped fruit can also be quite striking. Tomatoes grown for canning are often elongated, 7–9 cm long and 4–5 cm diameter; they are known as plum tomatoes.
Cultivation
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Hydroponic and greenhouse cultivation
Tomatoes are often grown in greenhouses in cooler climates, and indeed there are cultivars such as the British 'Moneymaker' and a number of cultivars grown in Siberia that are specifically bred for indoor growing. In more temperate climates, it is not uncommon to start seeds for future transplant in greenhouses during the late winter as well. With the transplanting of tomatoes, there is a process of hardening that the plant must go through before being able to be placed outside in order to have greater survival.
Hydroponic tomatoes are also available, and the technique is often used in hostile growing environments as well as high-density plantings.
Tomatoes are falsely claimed to be self-pollenating. Outdoors, bees and wind do the trick, but in a greenhouse, pollination must be aided by artificial wind, vibration of the plants (one brand of vibrator is a wand called an "electric bee" that is used manually), or more often today, by cultured bumblebees.
Propagation
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Pests and diseases
Tomato cultivars vary widely in their resistance to disease. Modern hybrids focus on improving disease resistance over the heirloom plants. One common tomato disease is tobacco mosaic virus, and for this reason smoking or use of tobacco products should be avoided around tomatoes.[1] Various forms of mildew and blight are also common tomato afflictions, which is why tomato cultivars are usually marked with letters like VFN, which refers to disease resistance to verticillium wilt, fusarium fungus, and nematodes.
Some common tomato pests are cutworms, tomato hornworms, aphids, cabbage loopers, whiteflies, tomato fruitworms, flea beetles, slugs,[2] and Colorado potato beetles.
Cultivars
There are a great many tomato cultivars grown for various purposes. This section attempts a listing of some of the more common cultivars. Heirloom cultivars are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among home gardeners and organic producers, since they tend to produce more interesting and flavorful crops at the possible cost of some disease resistance. Hybrid plants remain common, however, since they tend to be heavier producers and sometimes combine unusual characteristics of heirloom tomatoes with the ruggedness of conventional commercial tomatoes.
Tomato cultivars are roughly divided into several categories, based mostly on shape and size. "Slicing" or "globe" tomatoes are the usual tomatoes of commerce; beefsteak tomatoes are large tomatoes often used for sandwiches and similar applications; plum tomatoes, or paste tomatoes, are bred with a higher solid content for use in tomato sauce and paste; and cherry tomatoes are small, often sweet tomatoes generally eaten whole in salads.
Tomatoes are also commonly classified as determinate or indeterminate. Determinate, or bush, types bear a full crop all at once and top off at a specific height; they are often good choices for container growing. Indeterminate cultivars develop into vines that never top off and continue producing until killed by frost. As an intermediate ground, there are plants sometimes known as "vigorous determinate" or "semi-determinate"; these top off like determinates but produce a second crop after the initial crop. Many, if not all, tomatoes described as heirlooms are indeterminate.
Commonly grown cultivars include:
- 'Beefsteak VFN' (a common hybrid resistant to Verticillium, Fusarium, and Nematodes)
- 'Big Boy' (a very common determinate garden cultivar in the United States)
- 'Black Krim' (a purple-and-red cultivar from the Crimea)
- 'Brandywine' (a pink, indeterminate beefsteak type with a considerable number of substrains)
- 'Burpee VF' (an early attempt by W. Atlee Burpee at disease resistance in a commercial tomato)
- 'Early Girl' (an early maturing globe type)
- 'Gardener's Delight' (a smaller English cultivar)
- 'Juliet' (a grape tomato developed as a substitute for the rare Santa F1)
- 'Marmande' (a heavily ridged cultivar from southern France; similar to a small beefsteak and available commercially in the U.S. as UglyRipe)
- 'Moneymaker' (an English greenhouse cultivar)
- Mortgage Lifter (a popular heirloom beefsteak known for gigantic fruit)
- 'Patio' (bred specifically for container gardens)
- 'Purple Haze' (large cherry, indeterminate. Derived from Cherokee Purple, Brandywine and Black Cherry)
- 'Roma VF' (a plum tomato common in supermarkets)
- 'Rutg
ers' (a commercial heirloom cultivar)
- 'San Marzano' (a plum tomato popular in Italy)
- 'Santa F1' (a Chinese grape tomato cultivar popular in the U.S. and parts of southeast Asia)
- 'Shephard's Sack' (a large variety popular in parts of Wales)
- 'Sweet 100' (a very prolific, indeterminate cherry tomato)
- 'Yellow Pear' (a yellow, pear-shaped heirloom cultivar)
Most modern tomato cultivars are smooth surfaced; but some older tomato cultivars and most modern beefsteaks often show pronounced ribbing, a feature that may have been common to virtually all pre-Columbian cultivars. In addition, some tomato cultivars produce fruit in colors other than red, including yellow, orange, pink, black, brown, and purple, though such fruit is not widely available in grocery stores, nor are their seedlings available in typical nurseries, but must be bought as seed, often via mail-order. Likewise, some less common varieties have fruit fuzzy skin, as is the case with the Fuzzy Peach tomato and Red Boar tomato plants.
There is also a considerable gap between commercial and home-gardener cultivars; home cultivars are often bred for flavor to the exclusion of all other qualities, while commercial cultivars are bred for such factors as consistent size and shape, disease and pest resistance, and suitability for mechanized picking and shipping.
Gallery
Tomato vegetable
Greenhouse tomato
Unripe tomatoes on a vine, good for pickling
The flower and leaves are visible in this photo of a tomato plant.
Tomato plants in the garden
Tomato seedling
Tomato slices
References
External links
- w:Tomato. Some of the material on this page may be from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons license.
- Tomato QR Code (Size 50, 100, 200, 500)
- ↑ Tomato-Tobacco Mosaic Virus Disease Extension.umn.edu. URL Accessed June 30, 2006.
- ↑ Slugs in Home Gardens Extension.umn.edu. URL Accessed July 14, 2006.
