Gardening: If you think there's no accounting for taste

... you'd be surprised when it come to growing some of the 126 varietie s of tomato on offer. By Anna Pavord

I have been defrosting the freezer. It is an antediluvian model - the kind with a black flip-top lid which the village newsagent used to keep his ice-cream in. You could fall into its icy, cavernous bottom and never be seen again. I hate the job, but freezers are like filing cabinets. The system only holds up if the person who puts stuff in is the same person who pulls it out.

Buried at the bottom among the stray gooseberries and escaped broad beans were five bags of tomatoes, the remnants of last year's harvest. I froze 60lbs of tomatoes last year, and hope to do the same again this season. They freeze brilliantly if you bag them up whole and unskinned. Then they don't stick together and you can fish out whatever quantity you want. If you run a frozen tomato under the cold tap, the skin peels away like silk.

We grow all ours outside. Often, you can risk setting plants out at the beginning of May. This year, May having been so treacherously cold and windy, we delayed, so we won't be picking tomatoes at the beginning of July as we sometimes do. And this year, I'm growing more big beef tomatoes than usual. They are slower to mature than small-fruited bush varieties such as `Tumbler' and `Tornado'.

The plants need watering in well when they are first set out, whether you plant them in pots, Gro-bags or open ground. But once they have settled and are growing away, you shouldn't water too much. Studies at the National Vegetable Research Station at Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, indicate that overwatered tomatoes (and sweetcorn, French beans and runner beans) produce leaf at the expense of fruit. Hold off until the plants begin to flower, then start watering again.

I sowed seed of the tomatoes `Super Marmande' (Marshalls, 77p) and `St Pierre' (Marshalls, 99p) on 18 March and raised plants inside on the kitchen windowsill. If you sow seed in a 5in pot, you can prick out the seedlings into individual 3in pots where the plants will happily stay until they are planted outside.

These are both French varieties, producing large, meaty tomatoes, sometimes oddly shaped but always superbly flavoured. `St Pierre' is the later of the two, so I hope for a long succession of fruit. Both need to be trained up on stakes. You also have to pinch out the side-shoots that grow out from the main stem.

These two, together with the small fruited bush tomato `Brasero' (Mr Fothergill, pounds 1.75) that I sowed as well, would have been enough on their own to fill the freezer. But I had a rush of blood to the head and also ordered, earlier this year, the Heritage Collection of 10 different tomato plants offered by Mr Fothergill. It includes obscure wonders such as `Red Peach', never commercially grown because the flesh bruises so easily, `Black Russian', with a purple-black skin, and `Brandywine', an heirloom from America. My Tomato Cookbook (Salamander, pounds 8.99) is going to be worked to death.

The Fruit and Vegetable Finder lists 126 different kinds of tomato. The delight of growing your own is being able to test different kinds each year.

The first tomatoes seen in Europe were yellow-skinned kinds, which gave them their popular name of pomodoro. Like potatoes, they were treated with great suspicion. Gerard said the whole plant had "a ranke and stinking savour". Early cookery writers advised cooking them for at least three hours to drive off the poison that was supposed to lurk in the fruit.

Purple-skinned tomatoes such as my `Black Russian' were once common but even in 1905, the gardener William Robinson noted in The Vegetable Garden that "consumers continue to favour the red varieties". I thought "consumer" was a modern term. Evidently not. Robinson listed a `Mikado Purple', `Purple Champion', `Purple Ponderosa' and `Apple-Shaped Purple'. Many of these must have been raised by 19th-century gardeners from seed saved from the best of their crops. The seedlings would not always have had the same characteristics as their parents. Tomato seed stays viable for at least four years.

In their homelands - Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia - tomatoes grow in dry, poor ground. Overfeeding, like overwatering, produces leafy growth at the expense of fruit. In Ecuador, tomatoes are often used as ground cover among stands of sweetcorn. Once planted, they are left to their own devices. The same combination would work here if you used bush tomatoes such as the extra-early `Red Alert' or `Sleaford Abundance'.

Over the past few years, there has been a boom in new varieties of outdoor tomato. Flavour develops more fully in tomatoes grown outside than it does in greenhouse fruit. And the plants don't attract whitefly in such clouds. The first outdoor types were unpopular because they started fruiting so late that half the crop was fit only for chutney. But using small cherry tomatoes such as `Gardener's Delight' and `Sub Arctic' as parents, breeders have produced a race of fast-maturing, wonderfully flavoured bush tomatoes.

Because they don't need staking, bush tomatoes are easier to manage in Gro-bags than the upright, single-stem varieties. You don't have to pinch out the side-shoots, either. If you live in the north, choose the earliest cropping bush varieties, such as `Red Alert'.

Where space is limited, upright growing, staked tomatoes may be the only option. These are often called cordon, or more muddlingly "indeterminate" varieties. They don't have to be confined to stakes in the vegetable garden. Olivier de Serres, agricultural adviser to the French king Henri IV, said that tall-growing tomatoes were often used in France to cover outhouses and arbors. That is how I am going to use my `Broad Ripple Yellow Currant' tomato, one of the Heritage Collection. Seed of `Yellow Currant' (pounds 1.50) is available from W. Robinson & Sons, Sunnybank, Forton, nr Preston, Lancs PR3 0BN (01524 791210). Look out for another collection of Heritage Tomatoes in the 1998 catalogue of Mr Fothergills Seeds, Kentford, Newmarket, Suffolk CB8 7QB (01638 552512).