The results are in for this year's
experiment in backyard Darwinism tomato patch; the clear winner was "siberian", which chose a many-small-fruits
r-strategy to keep ahead of the predating squirrels and actually managed to deliver a steady stream of tomatoes to be eaten by the larger predators who planted it. Caspian pink, however, went for the extreme K-strategy and made one tomato all season, which the squirrels ate. Cherokee purple also produced one tomato, which I did manage to nab before it became another statistic, and brandywine scored a 50% success rate by making two fruits, one of which a squirrel ate. (You may be beginning to notice a pattern here.) Black prince and black krim managed a bit better, but I didn't care for their tomatoes. And the hybrids, well, were hybrids, maybe a dozen successfully human-eaten offspring amongst the three and reasonably tasty compared to the plastic ones from the market. I've now pulled up and composted all of the vines except celebrity, which still has a tennis-ball-sized fruit on it that's a bit too green yet to bring in to the safety of the windowsill. Definitely going to go with more "if we make a LOT of little ones the squirrels might not grab them all before they ripen" varieties for next year's garden...