Tomato Trials Part 1
2025 VCE Home Vegetable Variety Trials: Tomatoes—Celebrity Plus vs. Jolene, Part 1
I had the opportunity to sign up for the VCE “Home Vegetable Variety Trials” in February of this year. My garden already had a lot of different plants, so I opted to try the tomato trials as they included two varieties that I hadn’t planned on growing: Celebrity Plus and Jolene. Both are determinate, which means the plants grow to a certain, smaller mature size, and then stop growing, versus indeterminate tomato plants, which grow, and grow more, and keep on growing, up to nine-foot vines!
Part 1 covers from Feb to July 4th. (Look for a future post detailing the next few months’ progress.)
What you get from VCE for the trials:
• Seeds sent in lovely pre-labelled packages. I received seven seeds of each variety.
• A lovely, printed questionnaire to track the germination and seed transplant dates, to track which seeds had better results,
to track the first harvest, etc.
I personally loved having a paper copy to keep specific notes on. Then in September, they will email a finalized questionnaire to complete and send notes back electronically. If you’re new to gardening, you’ll soon find out you’ll need a book, journal, Post-it notes, or some sort of note taking system. Most seasoned gardeners have a system which was usually spurred on by “what the heck happened” gardening moments. All seven of each variety’s seeds were planted on March 25th in trays, using potting soil; germination started on April 1st with five Jolenes and one Celebrity Plus.
May 8th progress: Tomatoes were getting established and were watched over by Michael Jamm, an expert gardener. And, yes, all the other rows are other tomatoes that I am growing (Purple Calabash, Genovese, Sun Gold, Sweet Million, Red Chefs Choice, and Orange Chefs Choice) for a grand total of twenty-three tomato plants. (In the top right corner are Edamame plants.)
We did lose two Jolenes. We made a choice to put straw/hay in our strawberry bed and used some as mulch between the rows of tomatoes. Words of wisdom: there’s a reason the stuff at the garden centers, that is wrapped in plastic, is more expensive than a bale of hay from Home Depot: the bale had seed heads in it!!! There was grass sprouting everywhere!!!!
June 13th: Tomato boom started. We fertilized with liquid tomato feed every three weeks, starting June 13th. Jolenes were producing more tomatoes and flowers but there was still an obvious size difference between the two varieties.
June 29th: We had our first harvest from Jolene. Everything looked nice at first and then we saw the blossom end rot. We never had any issues with tomato varieties before and had a soil test done. The recommendation was to add lime to the soil, which was done at the time of planting, since we didn’t have six months for it to absorb. We also added chicken manure to up the calcium. As our other tomatoes came along, no other tomatoes had this issue beyond the first or second tomato from the plants.
To be continued...
