There are plenty of reasons to love growing determinate tomatoes. As bush-type tomatoes, they are biologically limited to a height of around four feet. They grow until the terminal bud is set and then switch over to fruit production. All fruits come in at once, over a 2 to 5-week period, earlier in the season. The defined stature of determinate tomatoes needs only the light support of tomato cages or stakes, and they don’t require any pruning at all.
Sounds perfect.
Except when things go terribly wrong. Between the weather (too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry) and any of the more than 200 species of pests and diseases that tomato plants may host, you only have that brief fruiting window to get determinate tomatoes right.
Indeterminate – or vine – tomatoes are much more forgiving, generous, and hardy.
These types grow continually throughout the season. Reaching 6 to 8 feet or more in length, vine tomatoes put out new flowers and fruit all the while until they are killed by frost.
If you’ve had rotten luck growing bush tomatoes, I’d encourage you to give vining tomatoes a try. As long as you are prepared for their mighty proportions and plan accordingly, indeterminate tomatoes can be much easier to grow and bring to a fruitful harvest. They get a bad rap for their non-stop growth, but I’d argue that’s a beautiful thing.
1. A Longer Harvesting Period
The harvesting window for vine tomatoes is limited only by the length of your growing season.
In warm climates, you could eke out a continuous harvest of indeterminate tomatoes for six months or longer. In cooler climes, the fruits will keep coming in for two or more months.
When it’s a good year with a warm autumn, I can usually squeeze out three months of good tomato production from indeterminates in my temperate climate. But as the days get shorter and the nights cooler, inevitably, the fruiting slows down, and plants begin to lack vigor.
Even so, indeterminate tomatoes will keep on providing green tomatoes up until the first killing frost. Green tomatoes you can’t turn red are still good to take and quite tasty, battered and fried or whipped up into a mock salsa verde.
2. Higher Yields
No knock on determinate tomatoes; they give great yields! But pound-for-pound, indeterminate varieties are capable of producing far more tomatoes per plant.
Bush tomatoes, with their shorter production time, may be flush with fruit for as little as 2 to 3 weeks. Meanwhile, vine types produce a steady supply of fresh tomatoes from mid-summer to frost.
With at least double the harvesting period, indeterminate tomatoes are excellent providers due to their never-ending growth habit. The exact yields per plant will vary based on the length of your growing season and the specific variety you grow.
A cherry tomato might provide hundreds of bite-sized fruits, but beefsteak and other large tomato varieties will generally give heftier returns but with fewer fruits overall.
3. Great for Fresh Eating
Only gardeners can possibly know that the best-tasting tomatoes are the ones you grow yourself. Ripened on the vine, the quality of garden tomatoes is second to none. Grocery produce pales in comparison to the size, brightness, freshness, and deeply flavorful umami sweetness of homegrown varieties.
If you like to enjoy your tomatoes raw, indeterminate tomatoes are your better bet. They don’t ripen all at once like determinates do. Instead, they come in like a steady trickle, furnishing you with fresh tomatoes from mid-summer onward.
The prolonged harvest is made possible because of the indeterminate tomato’s perpetual growth habit. Where bush tomatoes stop growing vertically once they flower and set fruits all at once, vine tomatoes grow from a main stem that continually bears new flower clusters as its growing tip lengthens.
With indeterminate tomatoes, fruits begin to develop at the bottom of the plant and ripen progressively up the vine. You’ll see a gradual succession of maturity levels– fruits blushing red at the lower branches, smaller immature green tomatoes above those, and clusters of yellow flowers nearest to the growing tips.
4. Good for Canning
It’s often said that indeterminate tomatoes aren’t good for canning because of their continuous provisioning. Humbly, I disagree.
It’s true that the advantage of determinate tomatoes for batch cooking and preserving is the fruits come in all at once, and you can process them right away. And the disadvantage of canning indeterminates is exactly because of their long harvesting window, making it harder to have as many ripe tomatoes at once that the recipe calls for.
Here’s what I do: I stash vine tomatoes in my freezer as they’re harvested. I wash and core them first, then stick them in large ziplock bags.
Once I’ve collected the last tomato of the season, I pull out the freezer bags and weigh my total haul. Then, I can go ahead and plot out my pasta sauces and salsas.
Freezing tomatoes is excellent for preserving flavor and allows me to put off the task of canning until autumn or winter. And that’s just perfect for me – I’d much rather delay my days-long canning sessions until later in the year when there’s less going on in the garden patch.
5. Diverse Varieties to Grow
The ancestor to all domesticated tomatoes is the wild tomato (Solanum pimpinellifolium), with fruits no larger than the size of a blueberry. Intensive breeding of ‘pimp’ tomatoes – first by the Aztecs and later in Europe – has generated more than 10,000 varieties of the modern tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) we grow in our gardens today.
You only need to flip through a seed catalog to see a sampling of the incredible range of options available to tomato growers. The cultivars vary in size (from 1-ounce cherries to 2-pound beefmasters), and shapes (round, oblate, pear, torpedo, bell, ribbed), and in colors well beyond red (yellow, orange, green, white, purple, blue, black).
As wild tomatoes are indeterminate vines, most cultivated tomato varieties are as well. The bushing habit of determinate tomatoes is a selectively bred trait that was originally developed for commercial growers so they could mechanically harvest whole fields at once.
Where there are perhaps hundreds of determinate tomato cultivars you can grow, there are quite literally thousands of indeterminate types. Many of the most colorful, unusual, and supremely flavorful tomatoes are heirlooms, and heirlooms tend to have that perpetual vining tomato habit.
If you wish to move past the usual round and red tomato, you’ll have a staggering amount of choice in growing a rainbow of irregularly shaped fruits when you open yourself up to indeterminate growth habits.
6. Vertical Growth
Naturally, indeterminate tomatoes are scramblers. Although we call them vine tomatoes, they don’t climb as they lack tendrils to attach themselves to structures. Without support, the main stem grows vertically until it eventually flops over and continues on along the ground, rooting wherever it touches the earth. If you have the space, vine tomatoes can be grown as an edible ground cover when allowed to spread and branch out over the soil.
Indeterminate tomatoes aren’t nearly as much of a space hog when they are grown vertically. Tied and trained upward, there are many options when it comes to supporting vine tomatoes. Whatever you choose should be tall and strong enough to bear the height and weightiness of indeterminates.
I’ve tried various tomato supports – including extra-tall homemade wire cages, string lines, and bamboo obelisks – but my favorite way to tame these beasts has to be t-posts. Pounded into the ground, each tomato plant gets trained and tied to a 6-foot-tall stake that’s incredibly sturdy and likely to outlast me.
Since they don’t cling, vine tomatoes need to be tied to the t-posts as they mature. Use soft materials, like jute twine or strips of cloth, so the tie doesn’t cut into the stem.
To keep the tomato stems securely lifted up off the ground, first tie a double knot tightly to the post, just below a notch or into one of the provided t-post holes. Then make another double knot around the tomato stem, beneath a spot where it branches. Keep this tie loose so the plant can continue to grow up and increase in height freely.
7. Prune to Size
It’s tricky to peg down universally accepted spacing for indeterminate tomatoes. Some seed packets will tell you to plant them 24 to 36 inches apart in rows 4 to 6 feet apart. Others will say to keep plants 30 to 48 inches apart in rows 3 to 4 feet apart.
Despite having the best intentions to toe the line on spacing recommendations to some degree, it never seems to work out that way for me. There are always extra sprouts when I start tomatoes from seed. Instead of throwing them away, I find a spot for them in the garden.
This year, with its surplus seedlings, worked out to only 24 inches between plants with 3 feet between rows. Certainly, we’re at the absolute minimum amount of suggested spacing! And yet the tomatoes are doing fine – the plants are producing fruit and are blight and disease-free.
Pruning indeterminates is not optional, especially when you want to squeeze more than advised into one planting bed.
Pruning all branches back to a single main stem will give earlier tomatoes but less yield overall. Allowing two or more leaders to grow will give more tomatoes, and the fruits will have better foliage protection from the sun.
Vine tomatoes are amazingly tolerant of heavy pruning, even late in the season. I’m liable to forget to keep on top of suckers as they appear, but I’ve found no major difference in production by removing branches even after they’ve become quite lengthy.
Indeterminate tomatoes don’t seem to mind. You can top them when they become too tall, and you can shorten branches that are too long. You can snip and hack away at the vines. As long as you keep at least one or two stems going, indeterminate tomatoes will continue to grow and produce fruit.
All in all, there’s a lot to love about vine tomatoes, too:
For the bountiful and long harvests, for the diversity of varieties you can grow, for their resilience in less-than-ideal weather conditions, and for their easygoing nature and seeming imperviousness to diseases and pests.
All you’ve got to do is prune and support them along the way. For me, it’s a small price to pay for reliable and continuous tomato production every year.
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