The Most Interesting Tomato Plant of the Month! AUGUST 2024 Edition!

The Most Interesting Man in the World

If the collective voices of the gardening world that is on Facebook are to be believed, many backyard growers are not having the best of gardening seasons, In fact, some are reporting epic failures. If the heatwave that struck California in late June and continued through most of July wasn't bad enough, gardeners have been forced to do battle against hordes of rats intent on stealing every last bit of delectable summer garden goodness.

If this describes your gardening experience this summer, my most sincere apologies. Trust me, I've been there. I remember one summer with ZERO production from eight plants that I had placed into one of the first raised gardening beds that I would build. If I wanted a tomato that year I had to buy it from someone else. Then came the rat raids that decimated past gardening efforts. If I am describing your experience this year, I have these words of advice: Don't give up. Try, try again. You have learned much, young padawan. Apply these harsh lessons to next year's effort, and the year after, and the year after that.

Pink Ping Pong Tomatoes

In time you will begin to apply these harsh lessons into growing vegetable gardens that you never dreamed possible. It doesn't happen overnight. But if you keep at it long enough, as I have, it does happen. Case in point? The Most Interesting Tomato Plant of the Month -- which happens to be the month of August, 2024. The most interesting plant also happens to be one of the most productive. But, I will also warn you that this isn't one of the easiest varieties to grow. In fact, I've experienced more misses and flops with the tomato plant to the left than I've had hits.

So, why grow it if it's so unreliable? Because I enjoy garden failures? No, not really. It's the challenge, I suppose. I also recall the one good year I've had with this variety, which was most excellent and a massive stroke of luck. I handed out bags of cherry tomatoes to all of my friends at work that year, and it's this one that many of them cited as their most favorite in the collection. It is called Pink Ping Pong. It is the most interesting tomato plant for the month of August in my Citrus Heights garden. It also happens to be the most productive at the moment and may continue to hold onto that lofty spot through September (although there will be other challengers).

Pink Ping Pong Plant

Pink Ping Pong is an heirloom tomato variety. What is an heirloom? Heirloom = OLD. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of information regarding exactly where it came from or how it came to be. The story, related by several growers, is that the seeds for this variety were first collected by Andrew Rahart. Yes, this is the same Andrew Rahart who was also responsible for the tomato plant variety known as Andrew Rahart's Jumbo Red. Which is also another heirloom. Rahart lived in upper New York state as the story goes and collected seeds from tomatoes that he considered to be unusual. Long before the age of the World Wide Web, he would farm these seeds out to others via snail mail. That is how Pink Ping Pong really caught on.

The variety caught the attention of another famous grower in New Jersey. Dr. Carolyn Male was so impressed with this tomato that she included it in her heirloom tomato bible, a must-have book for any tomato plant afficiando: 100-Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden. If you do not have a copy of this book, get one. You will not regret it. Carolyn, unfortunately, passed some years ago. But her experience lives on. Understand that there are literally THOUSANDS of heirloom tomato varieties. Carolyn tested many of them. She had the farm acreage to do it. So, getting on her "Top 100" list is quite the accomplishment.

Pink Ping Pong Production

"Pink Ping Pong is aptly named," she writes. "It's about the size of a ping pong ball and has a soft pink color. The taste is very sweet, smooth and juicy. I don't grow cherry tomatoes for taste alone. They are fantastic for salads and snacking."

My Pink Ping Pong effort this year was the product of a seed starting effort in a spare bedroom. Seeds were planted in a red solo cup and got enough winter sunshine through a closed window to germinate. Like any tomato plant started in this way, the seeds that sprouted grew quite leggy and weak, a development was not rectified until the hardening off process started in earnest this past spring. Although I had better starter plants to choose from (a tomato growing friend gets great results from his greenhouse), I kept the leggy starter plant that I grew and farmed out the leftover Pink Ping Pong plants to other gardeners.

It anchors "Cherry Row." This is a row of five cherry tomato varieties that include Super Sweet 100, Sun Sugar and Sugar Lump, among others. Although it got off to a slower start than the other, stronger cherry varieties, it soon caught up. My Pink Ping Pong is now over six feet tall, handled our famous heatwave this summer like most heirlooms do, and set a fabulous crop.

Cherry Tomato Plant Row

The biggest harvest from this one plant, which came approximately two weeks ago, resulted in 20 vine-ripened Pink Ping Pong fruits. Which I promptly bagged up and handed off to various neighbors. But not before I snacked on three or four of them. I look forward to the next harvest of 20 or more, and the one after that. I don't care how hot it gets around here. Blistering temperatures do not shut down productive heirloom tomato plants. Ever. That's why people grow them.

This is the best Pink Ping Pong plant I've managed to grow since a volunteer plant sprouted out of an old North Natomas clay-muck soil garden and set a surprise crop of delicious tomatoes. That was many moons ago. But I have not forgotten that experience. Oddly enough, this "volunteer" sprang from a massive failure of an experience the previous summer. I think that plant grew all of three tomatoes. One of which obviously hit the ground and managed to drop a few seeds. The plants that sprouted from that gardening failure turned out to be some of the best and most productive that I ever grew.

Dumb luck? Maybe. It does happen in the garden. But it also results in an experience that you work to create again and again. Because, it's just that good.

Grow tomatoes, my friends. The payoff from efforts like Cherry Row is well worth the effort.