A mixed salad featuring this year’s tomatoes:

\-Loxton Lass (orange) – delicious

\-Green Zebra (green) – also excellent

\-Norfolk Purple (dark purple)

These three produced well and had almost no blossom-end rot despite irregular watering and drought.

Norfolk Purple was grown in a window box. 

Yield wasn’t huge, but it gave me a few fruits.

Taste isn’t the most outstanding, but the high anthocyanin content is a plus, and the color is really nice. Interestingly, the fruits varied in shape and some had very few seeds.

UG 849 14 F1 (the red industrial high-pigment hybrid) has a good classic tomato flavor, but it suffered quite a bit from blossom-end rot this year. I’ve started selecting and stabilizing a line from it (working with F2 now).

I also grew White Tomesol (not in the photo — it would have added a nice white touch 😄). The flavor is very good, but the plant dropped a lot of flowers during the heatwaves and set very few fruits.

For next year I’m looking for varieties of any color that are more heat-tolerant (better flower set during heatwaves) and more drought-tolerant. Not just brown or white/yellow — open to any interesting colors as long as they handle heat and irregular watering better.

Any recommendations?

These held up in heat & drought (plus tasting notes)