In fairness, backyard growing is challenging. And tomatoes are sometimes finicky bastards.
But! When things go right, and you can harvest at peak ripeness AND actually know how to tell when that is, you don’t get better tomatos, for fresh eating or canning
Fun fact - some tomato varieties can be harvested after they start to turn their final color, and left (stem side down) in a window to ripen the rest of the way.
The shittiest tomato I have grown still taste 10x better than store bought ones.
It takes some care to make your backyard tomatoes actually taste as spectacular as they can taste.
Last year I had the bad fortune of harvesting some truly bland tomatoes from the plants on my balcony. This was most likely a skill issue - I kept the tomatoes too hot, and didn’t fertilize them apart from the initial fertilizer that came with the soil I potted them in.
This year, my tomatoes tastes spectacular, because I fixed those problems.
Where i live theres a contest every year forma the best tomato (bulls heart) and i usually get one or two from a neighbor. Anyone with a small amount of land or a nice sized terrace grows tomatoes. I’m assuming this is a US problem where the tomatoes taste like cardboard.
Store-bought tomatoes are generally sub-par because of the logistical problem of tomatoes - when they are sufficiently ripe, they become too soft to transport without breaking.
On account of the square-cube law, smaller tomatoes are less prone to this issue, so anyone with no access to homegrown tomatoes will benefit from opting for smaller varieties.
Spoken like someone who’s never spent time in the US, where there’s a farm stand every quarter mile with some of the best tasting produce you’ll ever encounter for dirt cheap.
I grew up in the PNW, left when I was 18, back again with family for a few years to experience the lovely recessions and got out again for the final time almost a decade ago.
During my time there one part of my work was as a ‘forager’ for my company connecting our chefs with local farmers and artisans.
30 years ago when I worked at the Ritz Carlton as a line cook, we could get produce from The Chefs Garden (farmer Lee in Ohio) and that was the last time I smelled heirloom tomatoes as good as those grown in my grandmother’s garden.
I’ve been in the kitchen for almost 40 years in and outside the US and all of this experience summed up just to tell you: your tomatoes suck.
i hate that i know who you are talking about
