Beefsteak Tomato
Solanum lycopersicum
The biggest, latest and fussiest tomato. Everything that goes wrong with tomatoes goes wrong here first.
Always indeterminate, always big
Beefsteaks - Brandywine, Big Beef, Mortgage Lifter, Cherokee Purple - grow to eight feet or more and need the entire season. Start them indoors six to eight weeks before last frost and plan for a first ripe fruit in late July at the earliest.
Heat stops fruit set
Above roughly 90F daytime or 75F night, pollen becomes sterile and flowers drop without setting. Large-fruited types are the worst affected, which is why you often get an early crop, then a mid-August gap, then a second flush in September. Shade cloth during heatwaves and consistent moisture reduce but do not eliminate this.
Prune to one or two leaders
This is the type where pruning genuinely pays. Remove suckers (the shoots in the leaf axils) below the first flower cluster and keep one or two main stems. You get fewer but much larger fruit, better airflow, and earlier ripening - all of which matter for a variety that is racing the season.
Serious support
A fruit can weigh two pounds. Use a heavy stake, a Florida weave, or string trellising tied to an overhead wire. Standard cages bend. Tie loosely with soft ties every foot as the plant grows.
Blossom end rot
A sunken leathery black patch on the bottom of the fruit. It is a calcium delivery failure caused by irregular watering, not usually a soil calcium shortage - adding calcium to soil that already has plenty does nothing. The fix is even moisture: deep watering on a schedule and a thick mulch. Beefsteaks and paste types are the most susceptible. Affected fruit can be trimmed and used.
Cracking, catfacing and zippering
Concentric or radial cracks come from a sudden water surge after dry weather. Catfacing - puckered, scarred, malformed blossom ends - comes from cold weather during flower formation, and heirlooms are prone to it. Both are cosmetic.
Feed and water like a heavy crop
Compost at planting, then a potassium-leaning feed every two to three weeks after first set. An inch and a half to two inches of water a week, at the base, never overhead.
Diseases
Early blight and septoria arrive every year in this climate; strip lower leaves, mulch, and space widely. Late blight is rarer but destroys plants in days. Fusarium and verticillium wilt cause sudden one-sided collapse - buy VFN-resistant varieties where you can, and note that many of the best heirlooms have no resistance at all, which is part of the trade.
Harvest
Pick at the breaker stage - when the blossom end first shows colour - and finish indoors, or leave on the vine for maximum flavour and accept more cracking and pest damage. Vine-ripened is better; breaker-stage is safer. A tomato picked at breaker develops full flavour off the plant, contrary to common belief.
Storage
Never refrigerate. On the counter, stem down, out of direct sun, for up to a week. Beefsteaks do not can as well as paste types because of the water content, but they freeze whole - the skins slip off under running water when thawed.
- Habit
- Indeterminate
- Days to harvest
- 75-95
- Fruit size
- 10-32 oz
- Spacing
- 30-36 in
- Support
- Heavy stake or string
- Sun
- Full
- pH
- 6.2-6.8
- Sets poorly above
- 90F day / 75F night