Okay, northern gardeners: tomato season is upon us and we have some decisions to make. We could plant our gardens full of Early Girl or Better Boy tomatoes and we’ll have plenty of delicious tomatoes to cook with and enjoy… but they’ll all be red, which is predictable and uniform and maybe even a little dull.

Or we could do something daring and adventurous this summer and grow striped tomatoes. They’re unique, colorful, and tasty, too! You’ll be amazed at the impact these special tomatoes can have on your garden aesthetic and in your cooking. C’mon, join the fun!

Green Zebra

I don’t think I could start any article on striped tomatoes without placing Green Zebra at the top of the list. It’s earned this place by longevity—the variety turns 40 years old this year—and by its well-deserved fame as a well-known striped variety. Green Zebra is green when ripe and sports darker green stripes. It’s not technically an heirloom variety due to its youthfulness, but it’s open pollinated and is definitely an heirloom tomato in spirit. You can also check out the related Red Zebra and the newer Purple Zebra varieties. Purple Zebra is a hybrid with high disease resistance—it was an All-America Selections winner (national) in 2022.

Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye

Maybe the stripes aren’t as pronounced on Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye as they are on Green Zebra, but I promise you this: You won’t even care. Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye is gorgeous and productive with a tie-dyed appearance (seed catalogs often describe the interior color of the tomato as “kaleidoscopic”) that’s truly a delight. If you imagine Green Zebra as sedate and reliable, you can imagine Pink Berkeley as a gregarious overachiever. (Additional bonus: the tomatoes are quite large and yet mature nicely within our northern growing season.)

Striped Roman

Sometimes you just want a solid, workhorse tomato that’s productive and meaty. And if you can get all that in a striped tomato, it’s even better. Striped Roman is a roma tomato, a good producer, and excellent for making sauces. It’s a lovely, elongated tomato with orange stripes and is well worth adding to your garden.

Brad’s Atomic Grape

If you thought Pink Berkeley was wild looking, here is her even crazier cousin, Brad’s Atomic Grape. It’s hard to find words to describe the brilliance of this tomato, but each individual fruit varies in its coloring—oranges, greens, reds, blues, browns, purples—and pattern of striping. The result is a one-of-a-kind, prizewinning tomato variety that is surprisingly tasty, too. It’s named for Brad Gates who develops tomato varieties in California.

So, which one looks most interesting to you? We all love our tried-and-true tomato varieties, but there’s something fun about branching out into something new and exciting. Have fun!  

Samantha Johnson is the author of several books, including Garden DIY, (CompanionHouse Books, 2020). She lives on a former dairy farm in northern Wisconsin with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Peaches and frequently writes about pets, gardening and farm life.