By Olusanjo Awotunde
Tomato is one of the most important ingredients used in cooking everywhere you go. Tomatoes make your food sweeter and also make the food pasty. Beyond the role the crop plays in soup-making,
growing it is a lucrative business especially for farmers who can plant them in the dry season.
But if I may ask, what’s the colour of a tomato? I guess some people will tell me tomatoes are green when they’re not ripe and simply red when ripe. Yes, they are correct but tomatoes don’t just have one colour; in fact, they exist in different coats.
Tomatoes come in about every colour from white to purple, pink, yellow, orange, mottled, or, yes, striped. (No polka-dots.) Commonly grown varieties include Beefsteak, Big Boy, Brandywine and Boxcar Willie, to touch only on the Bs. Other cultivars include the suggestively named Mortgage Lifter, an heirloom variety popular during the 30s, and Purple Haze, a large cherry tomato derived from Cherokee Purple, Brandywine and Black Cherry. Whatever their colour, tomatoes have the same needs.
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It is therefore important to state clearly that each colour of tomatoes has a different taste. For instance, the black krim is a brownish Russian variety with salty state. This is because these tomatoes are found near the black sea. So, each tomato has its own flavour and paste quality.
Did you also know that apart from tomatoes having different colours, they also come with different varieties? Knowing these varieties and their characteristics helps you make decision on what type of tomatoes you need to grow. Most importantly, know your target market and what they want, know your soil and what it supports and know your system of planting and control mechanism.
In the next article, I will be listing various types of tomatoes and their various characteristics, until then, stay blessed.
NOTE: I shall discuss tomato types in the next article.
