I tried seeds from a few of my more productive Better Boy plants but all I got was stunted plants that produced little or no fruit. Those that produced fruit only put on a few malformed tomatoes that never matured.
I had been saving seeds for years from a few varieties of grape, cherry, and San Marzano tomatoes which do fine every year but I haven't planted those in two years now. The seeds I started with for my plum tomatoes were seeds saved from a neighbor's tomato plant 40 years ago. He told me they were seeds he brought with him from Italy in the 50's. They give me a huge eggplant shaped plum tomato that generally weighs in well over a pound. They grow as a bush about 5ft tall and get loaded with fruit. Their highly susceptible to disease though. I plant those away from my main garden in a couple of raised beds I have up near the house. They're a good tomato for sauce or paste but have little juice when you crush them. The old guy that gave me the seeds said to make sure to keep them far from any other tomato because tomatoes can cross pollenate and it'll ruin the seeds for next year. He would use fireplace ash, cow manure, and compost on his plants, and every two years he'd burn the ground by planting barley and burning it off when it dried out. He said it kept diseases out of the ground. I do the same if I see any issues during the summer. I generally just chop up my leaves and cover the ground, I burn off the un-composted leaves in the spring.
I had problems about 9 years ago with plants getting diseased, it was the first year I used a few bought plants I burned the garden, didn't plant there for 3 years after that, using it only as a covered compost pile for those three years. I cleared it off and tried planting there again after that but had problems again. At the end of the season I took the backhoe and I dug out the whole area down 5ft, and I put in all new soil and started over. That seems to have solved the problem.
I also no longer do the soakere hose for water, I use tubes that can be filled every few days with water. Since I don't plant a whole field full f tomatoes now, the tubes work fine. I still use a fine sprinkler on occasion too to rinse off the plants every so often. In the spring when the cedar and pine trees are making pollen, it coats nearly everything around here, including the tomato plants.
