True Love and TOMATOES

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Early crop: 70-day Jet Star, originally from Joseph Harris, now from Harris-Moran and retailed to home gardeners by Totally Tomatoes. These seeds produce excellent crops of high-quality fruit in the coldest and wettest of early spring weather. They are big, ripe all the way through when red on the outside, and not as sour as most early varieties. It's a skimpy-leafed indeterminate that grows well on a 4' stake.

Main Crop: 78-day Big Boy hybrid from Burpee. Big, reliable, good crop from a not-too-vigorous indeterminate hybrid. Perfect skins, meaty 16-ounce weight with superb flavor and the best aroma of any tomato variety known.

Neither the Jet Star nor the Big Boy carries much inborn disease resistance. and each has been replaced with descendants with VFN. Handy if you need them, but none has been as reliable or flavorful for us as the originals. If you live near town and other gardens, you might do better with similar varieties that have bred-in disease resistance. Try Harris Moran's Supersonic Hyb VF (75 days) or Jetsetter Hyb VFFNSt. A, a 64-day indeterminate with modern high-disease resistance, and/or Burpee's Big Girl Hyb VF (78 days), an indeterminate main-crop producer of huge crops of 1 pound or more, lovely red-through fruit with a flavor nearly equal to its Big Boy brother. For tomato disease-loaded soils, we'd suggest trying Schumway's own Early Goliath Hyb VFFNTASt., which produces at an extraordinarily early 58 days, or its senior, Goliath Hyb VFFNTA St., a 65-day main-crop tomato. Both are vigorous indeterminates that ignore diseases that decimate older varieties.

If you prefer growing nonhybrid, open-pollinated heirloom tomatoes, and have a long growing season and disease-free land, we recommend the finest-flavored tomato ever found: Brandywine. Its origins are under debate, and the name is applied to several different varieties; look for the 90-to 100-day extra-large, light rose-pink fruit growing on a potato-leafed, indeterminate plant. If your season is short, try the original Beefsteak, an indeterminate plant type, producing huge (2 pounds is not unusual), irregular and flattened pink fruit, with a lovely, naturally-sweet subacid flavor. Sliced thick on a hamburger, it runs all over your hands but is wonderful. When I was very young and living with my grandparents in Indiana, we ate Beefsteak slices with salt, pepper and sugar. Along with Herb Shriner and Larry Bird, that snack is another of Indiana's great contributions to American culture.

For salad tomatoes we have found none more reliable than old-timer Tiny Tim, a 60-day determinate, thick stemmed (16"-high, bush-like) plant that produces masses of 3/4" fruit that taste the way tomatoes should.

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