Garden Log: Valentine Is My Top Pick for Small Tomatoes

Valentine is the perfect combination of flavor, productivity, and disease resistance

It’s Valentine’s Day all summer long with these tomatoes

I grow a lot of different tomatoes. Big, small, slicers, paste, red, purple, black, green, orange, heirloom, hybrid, you name it, and I’ve probably grown it.

But when it comes down to tomatoes that I grow year in and out, there are only a few.

My go-to beefsteak slicer is the Italian Costaluto because of the huge fruit and great flavor (though I find myself competing with rodents for the fruit). My favorite paste tomato is the classic Roma. Very productive, flavorful, relatively compact, and determinate so it fruits and gets out of the way.

When it comes to small tomatoes, my favorite without a doubt is Valentine, a grape tomato that’s unmatched for disease resistance, productivity, flavor, and versatility.

I first grew Valentine back in 2019, when it was still available only through Johnny’s Selected Seeds which had developed the tomato in conjunction with Penn State University.

The description in the Johnny’s catalog promised “deep red color, unusually rich flavor, and massive early yields” — all of which sounded good to me as I was a little tired of the two cherry tomatoes that were our garden staples for year — Yellow Pear and Riesenstraube.

Fast Growing, Fruit Early

Not knowing what to expect, I transplanted six Valentine seedlings into the garden in mid-March. They quickly took off and within four weeks were over a foot tall and equally wide. I had to transplant two of the plants to another bed because it was obvious that six was going to be to crowded for this bed. By the end of April, the plants were large enough to require staking, and about half were already flowering.

Once June rolled around, they were all 5-6 ft. tall and we were picking handfuls of deep red, very flavorful tomatoes. The catalog’s description was spot on.

Long Season, Very Productive

Two 2 gallon containers (about 20 lbs) of Valentine tomatoes – the 5th harvest this season!

Amazingly, the Valentine tomato plants kept on growing throughout July and August. By the time the end of August rolled around, they were each close to 9 ft. tall and 4 ft. wide. Dense, green, and very heavy. So heavy they broke their wooden supports and I ended up having to use a 6 ft. metal stakes and thick baling twine to keep them contained and upright.

And the productivity is ridiculous. At times there was so many little red tomatoes it was hard to see the leaves. We were picking close to 10 pounds of tomatoes off the plants every week or so, and it hardly looked like we had picked any.

Better yet, the triple digit heat that we get in late August and September, didn’t slow them a bit. While the other tomatoes were taking a break or calling it quits, the Valentines kept right going. In fact, they were still green and producing tomatoes in November!

If it hadn’t been for a few nights of frost and some bad weather, I’m pretty sure we could have been eating fresh tomatoes at Christmas.

Over the course of the season, with just four plants, we harvested 80 pounds of tomatoes from a 3 ft by 6 ft bed with no pests, no diseases, no problems at all.

Incredible.

Great Fresh, Cooked or Sauced

And if being robust, disease resistant and super productive wasn’t enough, the Valentine tomatoes fruit are second to none.

They’re grape-sized, about ½ ounce, with a firm deep red skin. The fruit is firm, not squishy, and the flavor is rich, round tomato with just a hint of tanginess. We ate them fresh – snacked on them like handfuls of candy and used them in salads. And, because they’re firm we were also able to skewer and grill them without getting soggy and falling off the skewer.

When we ran out of ways to eat them, we decided to see if they were any good for canning and preserving. They were. We filled our big slow cooker with the tomatoes, turned it on low for 24 hours, then took a stick blender to them to make some of the best tomato sauce we’ve ever made.

It’s hard to beat a tomato that can do all that. If someone bred the Valentine tomato up to the size of a large slicer, I don’t think we’d need any other tomatoes.

Valentine Tomato Summary

That first time I grew Valentine tomatoes I was so impressed I put together the video you can see below.

I think an even better endorsement is this tomato is now the small tomato I grow every year, and probably will every year hereafter. It’s really that good.

I guarantee you will not be disappointed with this tomato. It is flat out, the best little tomato there is.

Valentine tomato information