Choosing Tomato Varieties: Deciphering Indeterminate, Determinate and Dwarf Growth Habits

Reader Contribution by Craig Lehoullier
Published on February 2, 2016
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By now, your mailboxes are probably recovering from the strain of holding the endless stream of winter seed catalogs. Your eyes are likely red and tired from eyestrain as you flip through the pages. Possibly, your brain is hurting from sorting through the possibilities and making decisions. It reminds me my dilemma when deciding which music to listen to. My musical tastes are broad; I love music, and listen to it pretty much all day long. But sometimes trying to decide what to listen to brings about mental paralysis.

With thousands of choices of tomatoes available to tomato growers (especially if starting from seeds, rather than seedlings), a few simple basic considerations can provide some guidelines for narrowing the field, helping you make choices of what will appear in your garden this coming season.

Let’s start with one of the most basic attribute of a particular tomato variety – its growth habit. (In the next blog post, I will touch upon an equally important set of attributes – hybrid, heirloom and open pollinated.)

Indeterminate Tomato Varieties

Indeterminate tomatoes will be familiar to those who grapple annually with wild, tall, out of control plants that take up lots and lots of space. The central growing stem expands outward (or upward, if you tie it to a vertical stake or trellis) indefinitely – until you prune it at a particular height, or it is nibbled by a critter, or, most often, the plant dies at the end of the season from frost or disease.

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