Maryland Grows

Six years ago, I visited Burpee’s Fordhook Farm in Pennsylvania as part of the International Master Gardener Conference. We toured their trial garden, and one of the crops I noted was a direct-sow tomato plant. This is an exciting innovation to vegetable gardeners, because it means not having to start seeds indoors and raise your tomato plants under lights until it’s time to transplant them outdoors. You could just plant the seeds directly in the ground and still harvest your tomatoes at the same time as conventionally grown ones. I decided I had to try this when the seeds were available.

Well, it’s 2025, and the seeds have appeared in Burpee’s catalog, so I bought some. Here’s the lineup: two tomatoes and three peppers. I got seed for the Rain Drops tomato, a cherry (claims 70 days to maturity from sowing), and the Sow Sweet snacking pepper (60 days). Here’s how growing them went for me and what I thought of the results. (Note: this is nothing like a real field trial, but rather one small-scale gardener’s experience in one year.)

The instructions say to sow the seeds one week before the last possible frost in your area. This is a little hard to guess at, considering that our current climate pattern means warm weather in April followed by often-chilly May temperatures, including possible mid-month frosts, but I decided to err on the side of caution and sowed my tomato seeds on May 4. The pepper seeds went in even later, in mid-May. I wanted to grow the plants both in my home/community gardens and at the Derwood Demo Garden, but in the end the tiny tomato seedlings failed at Derwood and the pepper seeds never came up at my community garden, so I ended up raising one pepper plant at Derwood and some tomatoes at home.

I planted three tomato seeds about six inches apart in a circle in my home garden raised bed. They all emerged (at least so I thought) but didn’t grow very fast—we did, indeed, have some chilly May weather, though at least it didn’t freeze. When they did burst into sudden growth in June, I couldn’t bear to remove any of them, so I put a large tomato cage over all of them and let them go for it.

And I waited. I finally harvested the first ripe Rain Drops cherry tomato on August 1. It turned out that one of the plants growing in that protected circle was actually a volunteer out of my compost, which produced some small orange cherry tomatoes (Rain Drops is red and larger) a couple of weeks earlier. Unfortunately, they didn’t taste as good as Sun Gold, which was likely one of the parents, but at least my dog (Freckles, the Tomato Hound) likes them.

I’ve got Rain Drops coming in prolifically now, but August with a peak in September would be pretty late if this was the only tomato you were growing. How do they taste? They’re fine—they have a nice balance of sweet and acid and they’re a good size, but the skin is on the thick side, so that they resist your teeth when you bite in. Not my favorite texture.

Now back to the Sow Sweet pepper at the demo garden. At first I thought I wouldn’t get any plants at all, but one seedling finally came up when the soil got warm enough. Like the tomato, it put on a burst of growth in June, and has caught up to the transplants pretty well, though it’s still not as large. But I have yet to harvest a ripe pepper. I expect there will be some before the season is over. I took one fruit off the plant this week that had the beginnings of color, and did a taste test—again, it’s fine. Pleasant pepper flavor at that mature green stage. Weirdly, it also has a thicker skin than I consider normal in a pepper you’re likely to eat raw—the same tooth-resistance. I will taste again when I finally get a ripe fruit.

I will say that both of these varieties are disease-free, which is especially impressive in the tomato considering the summer’s humidity and the fact that the two plants are growing intertwined with a volunteer plant that has some fungal disease.

Admittedly, I didn’t give these plants the perfect conditions that might have yielded an earlier harvest. We did get a fair amount of rain earlier in the summer, and I watered at home as needed; Derwood has irrigation. I fertilized my tomato plants, though not as often as I probably should have. At Derwood we tend not to fertilize much as long as the plants look healthy, since our soil is heavily amended with compost. All the other pepper plants in that bed are doing well and produced earlier, although ripening has eluded some of the others too. So there may be some deficiency either of nutrients or sunshine (I think the blackberries and pawpaws are casting some shade). The tomato plants at home get nearly eight hours of sun. But I did disadvantage them by growing several plants close together.

Even so, I would have expected ripe fruit earlier in the season. Is there a use for these direct-sow crops in home gardens? Perhaps, depending on your circumstances. I wouldn’t grow them as your only tomato or pepper choice. If you have a small garden, you’re likely better off buying a few plants, especially considering the steep seed packet cost of the Burpee selections. And if you’re used to growing your own plants from seed indoors and getting a timely harvest from them, stick with that strategy. But if your garden is large enough to accommodate a few extra plants, and if you’ve had early-transplanted tomatoes succumb to fungal disease by August, it might be nice to have some disease-resistant plants coming along later in the season. Garden Sown™ might be a great second string choice, and if you have the space, it involves practically no extra effort on your part.

I have plenty of seeds left, so what I might do next year is sow them outdoors in pots in late April, and then transplant the results to my various gardens. That gives me more control, since I can move the seedlings indoors if a frost threatens, and they are easier to keep watered and sheltered.

If anyone else has tried these seeds, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. What was your experience? And if you haven’t tried them yet, would you?

By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.