Scott Reil is an accredited nurseryman with 20 years of experience in the field, or rather in the veggie patch, so it is worthwhile listening to what he has to say about choosing tomatoes for a small garden. Scott notes that homegrown tomatoes have an incomparable flavor, nothing like the store-bought types.
A lovely variety for children are cherry or grape type tomatoes like Sweet 100 (his all time favorite), Super Sweet 100, Sweet Millions. These are small bushy shrubs and deliver great crops. Then there are patio tomatoes for containers, which are prolific producers.
Scott is keen on heirlooms and encourages you to try them. They are sometimes weird looking but they taste great. Brandywine is the absolute best, he reckons, because like all heirlooms they were bred not for shipping or storing but for flavor, and only for flavor. He also likes Cherokee Purple, although he notes that these are really ugly! You also get yellow, orange, stripey, ghost and other purple heirlooms.
Scott says he always puts a pear-type tomato plant in the garden to produce tomatoes for sauces.