Rate your favorite (and least favorite) tomatoes and help create a shared resource for tomato lovers everywhere.
I believe we gardeners need an objective source of information on tomato varieties that reflects our actual experience and opinions - not those of the seed companies or the growers who both have a vested interest in selling a particular type of tomato.
To that end, I've developed a survey and will be collecting gardener's tomato reviews on an ongoing basis. I believe this will result in a comprehensive and objective picture of the best, and worst, tomato varieties on the market.
My plan is to publish the ratings to this web site on an ongoing basis as a resource for everyone.
Below, I've explained why I choose the criteria I did for the reviews, but if you want to skip that and just rate some tomatoes, click on the below link to get started.You can rate up to 25 varieties at a time. If you want to rate more, just take the survey a second or more times. You can take the survey as many times as you'd like.
The success of this project depends on getting enough gardeners to contribute reviews to make the sample sizes large enough to be representative. I would ask that you send this link to any gardener friends and ask them to contribute their opinions as well. You can cut and paste the below link into e-mail or just direct them to my blog site where a link is also posted.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TomatoReviewWhy I'm Doing This
Earlier this year, I reviewed the
catalogs of the five largest seed companies and noted that these
companies sell over 200 unique varieties of tomatoes. A large number to
be sure, but only a fraction of the tomato varieties which are
available to gardeners. I've seen other internet sources peg the
number of known tomato varieties in the thousands.
While having lots of choices can be good, it also creates plenty of problems for gardeners trying to decide on which varieties to buy. And the seed companies aren't much help in this regard; if you believe them, every tomato variety listed in their catalogs produces abundant quantities of delicious sweet tomatoes. Yeah right.
While some of these seed companies provide consumer review on their web sites, they only do so for the tomato varieties that they sell. This provides an incomplete picture, and If you buy tomato seeds or plants from several sources, you have no way to compare between them.
What's needed is a better source of information based on objective reviews.
Rating Criteria
The rating system I'm using asks gardeners to rate each tomato variety on a scale of 1 to 5 on the following criteria:
- Taste
- Appearance
- Yield
- Hardiness (Tolerance of hot/cold, wet/dry conditions)
- Disease & Pest Resistance
- Overall Rating
- Other
Comments (Place to add text comments)
I choose just six criteria for these ratings in order to encourage as many people as possible to rate their tomatoes. I understand that some gardeners will have wanted other criteria included in these ratings, but I consciously kept the the criteria spare so that folks don't get fatigued and abandon the review.
The criteria reflect the assumption that what matters most to gardeners is growing great tasting tomatoes and having plenty of them. So the criteria are focused on appetite appeal and yield. There's a catch-all "Overall Rating" criteria to track other factors not specifically called out for a numerical rating.
In addition, I've included an area for comments. This is the place where gardeners can enter information like: "Best as a paste tomato." or "Tomatoes are very watery. Not good for sandwiches." etc. etc.
If I see patterns in the comments for any given tomato, I'll add that information to the published numerical rating data to provide a more detailed picture of the tomato variety.
Most folks are currently harvesting, or are just about to harvest, their tomatoes, so now is the right time to begin asking for reviews. If I get a large response, I'll publish the first set of data in 4-6 weeks.
I plan to update the data on a quarterly basis, but it will depend on how many people decide to contribute ratings. The more that contribute a rating for a particular tomato, the more reliable that rating will be. Again, I encourage you to let your gardener friends know about this survey and ask them to contribute a review.
Thanks in advance for your help.
