The Bottom Line
If you lament that tomatoes don't taste as good as you remember, Dr. Male suggests you are growing the wrong tomatoes. Somehow she has culled down the thousands of tomato varieties she has grown over the years to her top 100 for home gardeners. This book is for the tomato loving gardener who takes great pride in growing the most flavorful tomatoes on the block.
Pros
- Varieties for every taste and garden
- Wonderful Color Photos
- Useful Descriptions: size, yield, sweetness
- The tomato reviews are personalized with comments on how they grew in her garden
- Seed sources are given for each variety
Cons
- No tomato comparison should take place without a taste test
Description
- Starts with some background on tomatoes and where all these heirloom varieties are coming from
- A particularly useful section on selecting suitable varieties and how you go about determining that
- Shares her preferences on growing techniques like what to fertilize with and how much, pruning...
- Discusses saving seeds, the crux of heirloom gardening, pollination and isolation distances
- 100 heirloom tomatoes, for those who want to eat their way from ‘Aker’s West Virginia’ to ‘Zogola’.
Guide Review - 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden
Dr. Carolyn Male has long been a tomato guru in heirloom vegetable gardening. She no longer publishes her "Off the Vine" newsletter, but this book pulls together not just her favorite varieties, but also the wisdom she has gained through the experience of growing thousands of tomato varieties.
More Books About Growing Tomatoes
- Book Review: The $64 Tomato - How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, by William Alexander
- Book Review: Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer
- Book Review: Tomatoland - How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
