Tomato Varieties: Sarah Raven picks some of the best

A cherry plum, sweet, thin-skinned and very prolific (you’ll also find it sold under ‘Red Grape Sugar Plum’). It was in the top three of our recent taste test and everyone liked it for its strong tomato flavour that’s sweet but not overly so, and its firm not mushy texture. It has a slight acidity running through it which all sweet tomatoes need. It ripens quite late compared to ‘Sungold’ and produces for a long period of time. It’s lovely in a mixed salad with the larger varieties. 

A small cherry form with thin, yellow-orange skin and an exceptionally sweet flavour. It is the longest and biggest cropper in our greenhouse every year and wins almost every taste trial. It also grows happily outside. Having a tomato that crops into autumn feels like a luxury.

This is the handsomest tomato, a cartoon-looking, Mediterranean market tomato. It has a tendency to lose its leader and go blind as it grows, so sometimes you need to train a lower axillary shoot (not pinched, obviously) to become the leader. 

One of the heaviest cropping beefsteak tomatoes we’ve trialled, with succulent, intensely flavoured fruit. It’s excellent sliced or chunked for salad. It  is a recent addition to our  must-grow list. 

A classic that produces fruit that’s somewhere between a cherry and a medium-sized tomato. It’s reliable, sweet, tasty, prolific and grows happily outside.

Good flavour, but we mainly grow it because it makes a tomato salad look fantastic when it’s combined with red, orange and dark varieties, plus  it is juicy and not too sweet.

Tomatoes are the richest source of a powerful and important antioxidant called lycopene, and this blue-black tomato contains good levels of anthocyanin too (famously good for our brains and the pigment that