And the winner is: Mighty Sweet grape tomato

This year’s winner is Mighty Sweet grape tomato, a tomato with a robust flavour, crisp fleshy walls and no cracks, even after all the rain we had in July.

Might Sweet cherry tomato (Photo by Brendan Zwelling)

Years ago, I belonged to a horticultural group that had a tomato-tasting event every September. It was the best fun, and also taught us a lot about tomato shapes, colours and flavours. Nowadays, I have taste competitions with tomatoes from my garden, inviting neighbours to be the judges. This yearโ€™s theme was small tomatoes, and the winner was the Mighty Sweet grape tomato, a tomato with robust flavour, crisp fleshy walls and no cracks, even after all the rain we had in July.

the Mighty Sweet grape tomato is a determinate type, which means it stops growing at a genetically determined height of 60 inches (1.5 m). My single plant still has a little way to go, continuing to put on height and produce flowers and fruit, arranged in clusters of 10. Itโ€™s one of the newly developed, nutrient-rich vegetables and fruit bred by Burpee Home Gardens,ย part ofย Ball Horticultural. Part of the Burpee BOOST High Antioxidant Collection of food plants, Mighty Sweet has 40% more lycopene than most tomatoes, and is high in flavonoids, vitamin C, beta-carotene and other phyto-nutrients, according to Ball. Itโ€™s also resistant to leaf mould, fusarium wilt race 1, tomato mosaic virus, nematodes and grey leaf spot.

The BOOST group includes several tomatoes, a pepper (Sweet Heat), a cucumber (Gold Standard) and a salad greens mix (Healing Hands Salad Mix), which Ball says has 20% more lutein, 30% more beta-carotene, 30% more total carotenoids and 70% more anthocyanins than comparable salad mixes. Those are big numbers for nutritional enhancement, and should be an incentive for more gardeners to grow food at home.

My job as a grower-taster is to be objective, and let me be clear that Mighty Sweet isnโ€™t really all that sweet, especially when compared to โ€˜Sweet Millionโ€™ or โ€˜Sungoldโ€™, two cherry tomatoes high on the Brix sugar scale. But Mighty Sweet has rich tomato flavour for a small-fruited hybrid, with a pleasant acid-sugar balance. The fruits hold well on the plant, turning red without falling off. And I particularly like their texture โ€” thick, crisp walls and not too much internal water. Best of all, flavour and consistency were unaffected by all the rain last month, and not one Mighty Sweet tomato cracked.

Iโ€™ve been growing tomatoes in containers for several years to avoid problems with the resident groundhog, and my experience is that container growing increases environmental stress on plants. Iโ€™m conscientious about fertilizing and watering regularly, but I suspect the increased soil temperature in containers is hard on tomatoes. No doubt growing tomatoes in the ground gives them a cooler root run. I put a two-inch (5-cm) thick mulch of shredded bark over the container soil around the tomatoโ€™s main stem to help reduce evaporation, but I donโ€™t think it does much to prevent the soil from absorbing heat through the sides of the containers. Tomatoes under heat stress tend to have thick skin, something I donโ€™t like in a salad tomato. Of the four tomato varieties I grew this summer, Mighty Sweet was the least affected by heat stress, and thatโ€™s another strong point in its favour.

Next summer Iโ€™m going to grow another BOOST tomato, and perhaps the salad mix. Canโ€™t beat those numbers.

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