Weekly Flora: Tomato ‘Tiny Tim’
Tomato ‘Tiny Tim’
I told myself I wouldn’t start going through the tomatoes on the Weekly Flora until I could see them ripening on the vine.
Then I totally went back on that promise to myself, because it was a silly thing to think I could do in the first place.
But that’s okay I forgive me.
This tomato is the first to form fruit for me this season, and thusly, will be the first eaten when it finished ripening. I am so looking forward to fresh-of-the-vine tomatoes. Soon I’ll be swimming in almost more then I can eat (since I have about 40 different plants currently growing). But for now, I have just this one, little guy, chugging along, ripening at his own rate.
I’ve never grown Tiny Tim before, but it’s always been on my “to-grow” list. I love tomatoes that are, you know, “weird”. Dwarf plants, heavily pleated fruit, bi-coloured (or tri-coloured!), white tomatoes (that one freaks people out). If it’s “weird”, I’ll have a go at it.
While ‘Tiny Tim’ might not be the weirdest one ever, it is an early dwarf variety, and it fits very nicely into a one-gallon container, letting me but my bigger tomatoes into the 5- and 10- gallon containers.
‘Tiny Tim’ is a commercial heirloom variety; it was bred for commercial purposes, but is older then 50 years (it was actually bred in 1945 by the University of New Hampshire). This year I plan to try growing it under lights during the winter. I go through serious fresh tomato withdrawal for months at a time, but I’m positive there is a tomato out there that will grow well under my fluorescent lights. I mean, it just has to work, right? RIGHT?
Lord help me I can’t eat those cardboard-tasting things the grocery store calls tomatoes that they trucked in from California.
That’s the problem with gardening – it totally makes you into a tomato snob.
