About

What this is

Tomato Almanac is a visual chooser and collector's guide to tomato varieties. The job is not to list every tomato ever grown. Larger databases already do that. The job is to help you decide what to grow: what a variety tastes like, how it actually behaves in the garden, what to plant instead when your favorite sells out, and which ones earn their place in a short-season bed.

What we cover

Heirlooms, hybrids, and open-pollinated varieties across the range that home gardeners actually plant: cherry and grape, paste and sauce, slicers and beefsteaks, dwarf and container types, and the strange, beautiful ones worth growing for their own sake. Each profile carries honest grow notes, a flavor description traced to its source, the seed vendors that sell it, and qualified swaps that read like “like this one, but earlier” or “but open-pollinated.”

Region first

We start with New England, a cold, short-season climate where variety choice decides whether you get ripe fruit before frost. Region is a first-class filter from the start, and other regions follow once the New England set proves out.

What we are not

We do not sell seed and we are not affiliated with any vendor. Some links to seed sources may be affiliate links, disclosed where they appear, but the picks are not for sale. We never present an AI-generated image as a real photo of a named variety. Read the full sourcing rules on the methodology page.

Who publishes it

Tomato Almanac is published as an organization, not under an invented personal byline. When a claim is uncertain, we say so and show the gap rather than paper over it.