Niki Jabbour’s Top Picks Among Cherry Tomatoes

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When the first cherry tomatoes start blushing red in mid-July, that's when summer really begins for me. Every year I grow at least a dozen varieties—hybrids and heirlooms alike—and put them through their paces for flavor, disease resistance, and overall vigor.

Cherry tomatoes are happy in garden beds or containers, as long as they get plenty of sun. I stake mine with seven-foot wooden posts and tie up the new growth every week. Every two weeks I give them a drink of liquid organic fertilizer to keep the harvest rolling in.

On the hunt for new cherry tomatoes to try? Here are four that I keep coming back to:

1. If I had to pick just one tomato for the rest of my life, it'd be ‘Sungold.’ These vigorous hybrids pump out hundreds of cherry-sized golden fruits that are almost absurdly sweet and packed with fruity flavor. They're early, too—the first fruits are ready to snack on just 57 days after transplanting.

2. A while back, late blight wiped out nearly my entire tomato patch—yet ‘Jasper’ stood there unfazed, churning out fruit right up until frost. This All-America Selections winner brings medium resistance to early blight and high resistance to late blight. And those bright red, crack-resistant fruits? They come in heavy.

3. The deep burgundy-purple fruits of ‘Black Cherry’ are pure summer magic. They've got a rich, sweet complexity that makes them irresistible right off the vine, and they're equally stellar in salads, bruschetta, and salsa. Best part? Since it's open-pollinated, we save the seeds from year to year.

4. ‘Sunrise Bumblebee’ is a newcomer in my garden but already a family staple. The plants are impressively prolific, and those golden fruits streaked with red are as gorgeous as they are delicious.

Image courtesy ofAll-America Selections.

Niki Jabbour, who gardens year-round in Nova Scotia, is aHorticulturecolumnist. She also writes atSavvyGardening.com. She's the author of several books on vegetable gardening, includingGardening Under CoverandNiki Jabbour's Veggie Garden Remix.