SLF - Pie Contest

Join us in 2008 on Saturday, Sept. 6th from 1-3pm for the 5th annual Tomato Trial Tasting. Free & Open to the public.

Last Saturday saw a great turnout of both tomatoes and tomato tasters for our 4th Annual Tomato Tasting Trial. Close to 60 varieties of tomatoes were on board, each ready for viewing and tasting.

Tomatoes
Grown here on the Farm

The overall winner was 'Sun Gold'. An orange cherry tomato with fantastic fruity, tangy taste. These things are like candy.

Without 'Sun Gold' to ruin the curve, the next favorites were mostly heirloom types including 'Striped German', 'Rose de Berne', 'Cherokee Purple' and a new one for us this year 'Cosmonot Volkov'.

'Better Boy' tomatoes, a standard slicing tomato hybrid, scored quite well this year. 'Better Boy's work well in our area since they ripen earlier than most heirlooms and beefsteaks.

The paste tomatoes were popular, with 'Giant Paste' rating the best in flavor. 'Orange Banana Paste' scored well on appearance, but there were a few comments about milder than desired taste.

'Green Zebra', 'Orange Blossom' and 'Mortgage Lifter' split the masses...Some tasters rated these quite highly, others considered them cellar-dwellers.

In the cherry tomato category, 'Sun Gold' was the clear winner, followed by 'Sweet Baby Girl' and 'Tomatoberry'.

Another successful tomato tasting yielded some of the perennial winners in the taste category. Namely 'Sun Gold', 'Brandywine' and 'Rose de Berne'. A couple of new entries were very well received: 'Comsonot Volkov' and 'Orange Banana Paste'.

We have our eye on some interesting new varieties to grow next year. Hopefully the growing season will be more conducive to a great tomato crop in 2007. We plan on the tomato tasting again next September. Hope to see you there.

Saturday, September 10th drew dozens of tomato lovers for the 2nd Annual Springledge Farm Tomato Tasting. We grew over 30 varieties of tomatoes in our fields and presented all of them under one roof for a comparative tasting.

The overall winner was 'Sungold', a delicious orange cherry tomato packed with flavor, just the right amount of acidity and even some hints of tropical fruit. Other favorite cherry tomatoes included 'Golden Sweet', a new trial for Springledge this year, with bright yellow fruit about an inch long and a very good tomato taste, and 'Sweet Million', a yearly favorite which yields hundreds of cherry tomatoes per plant.

In the heirloom category, 'Brandywine' topped the rankings again this year. 'Brandywine' is an old Amish heirloom, passed down for generations. Heirlooms are open-pollinated plants, meaning they are not hybridized. Open Pollinated plants produce seedlings that will grow very similar to the parent plant. No special pollination is required which makes it ideal for the home gardener who wants to save their own seed from year to year. Hybrid plants require two distinct and separate parent lines that produce seedlings with increased vigor and yield.

Other heirloom tomatoes with high scores in the tasting included 'Rose de Berne', a French heirloom, and 'Amish Paste', a flavorful, thick and meaty paste tomato.

Standard tomatoes, the kind you slice on your sandwich or eat with fresh basil and mozzarella, showed a range of scores. Topping the list are 'Buffalo', a greenhouse-type tomato we grow here on the farm in the early season, and 'Big Beef', a large beefsteak type grown in the fields. Both of these varieties are the classic red summer tomato.

The bottom of the pack was dominated by niche tomatoes. 'Striped Cavern' is an attractive stuffing tomato. It is best to hollow out the middle, fill it with a stuffing of your choice, and bake the whole thing. The flesh of the tomato itself leaves something to be desired, but its a great choice for a stuffing tomato. 'Mountain Gold' also scored low on the tasting, most likely because it is a low acid tomato.

The following is the official tally, albeit less than statistically significant.

We grew 47 varieties of tomatoes and on Saturday, Sept. 11th, 2004 we invited the public taste buds to try them all and rate them on flavor and appearance.

We plan on continuing these taste trials each fall as the harvest comes in. We will certainly offer these winning varieties as well as many others next spring in our tomato plant section. We will also grow them out in our fields for harvest at the farmstand all summer and fall.