Tastiest Toms for 2023.

[Bren In Pots]

Carrying on from Peanuts thread from last year, share your tastiest and most disapointing tomatoes grown this season.

Link to last years thread.

https://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gr...ting-toms-2022

[annie8]

So far I’ve only got sungold, rosella, green grape, moneymaker and red cherry. Of those rosella is the only one I’m growing for the first time and am liking it so far. Not as sweet as sungold, but tasty and slightly sharper flavour. Given that my tomatoes are so slow this year these get credit for at least giving me ripe tomatoes. Green grape is my favourite tomato so will always grow that. Other varieties still to ripen include crimson blush and indigo rose. Others that I have grown before include black icicle, Roma and yellow perfection.

[Penellype]

This year has been bitterly disappointing for almost every variety. Feeding and general management regimes have been the same as usual.

Balconi red - very dwarf bush suitable for windowsills. Normal performance produces lots of very early cherry tomatoes on the windowsill from a January sowing, and a 2nd flush outdoors in July. Flavour is not great but tomatoes in May are worth it.
Sowed 4, 2 germinated (new seed), once clearly wasn't Balconi red as it grew too big with no sideshoots and eventually produced medium sized tomatoes after being banished to the greenhouse. The other pant produced a small indoor crop, many of which had greenback, and the 2nd crop (in the greenhouse) is currently at the flower stage.
Shirley - my mainstay for early house tomatoes and greenhouse maincrop. Flavour is fair to good.
The January sown windowsill tomatoes got off to a good start by producing plenty of sideshoots to use as cuttings for the greenhouse. The fruit grew well but all of it got greenback in the hot and sunny June. Fruit was edible, but not particularly pleasant in salads. Normally these plants will produce strong, healthy sideshoots which can be grown on for a 2nd crop, but this year they are small and weedy if they have grown at all. Several of the greenhouse fruit also got greenback although some are ok, but the plants have now stopped setting fruit, presumably they are too cold. The flavour of the greenhouse fruit is always better than those grown indoors.
Sungold - my favourite cherry variety for snacks and salads. I normally grow 5 plants outdoors. Flavour is excellent (in my opinion). I do not remove sideshoots from Sungold, having found that they produce far more fruit if I let them grow into large rambling bushes.
Sowed 5 seeds but only 3 germinated. Sowed 2 more but they didn't grow either. Seeds were from a new packet. One of the 3 plants was planted in the growhouse at the allotment - last year I grew 2 tomatoes in the growhouse and the sungold took over completely, smothering the other plant and filling the whole 2ft x 6ft space. I therefore gave it the whole space this year, but having started off well, by the end of June (despite daily watering) the leaves were going yellow and falling off. The 2 plants at home fared a little better but not much. The plant at the allotment and one of the plants at home are now showing signs of blight on the odd branch - these branches are being cut off as soon as a brown spot appears on the stem. Blight does not normally appear here until early October or later. The crop is later than usual and smaller than usual.
Garden Pearl - small bush/basket variety which I grow outdoors mainly to use for soup. Flavour is fair, cooking seems to improve it.
Having proved tricky to germinate, eventually the plants grew well. The aim was to have 1 at home and 2 at the allotment, but one self seeded from last year at the allotment and has grown well, so I have an extra one. Lots of fruit at the allotment although later than usual. The plant at home has almost died - all the leaves have fallen off and the stems have died back. No idea what is wrong with it.
Ferline - my absolute favourite for flavour, medium and large tomatoes brilliant in salads, but fussy to grow and don't keep at all well.
An absolute disaster this year. They wouldn't germinate and I had to re-sow twice, at which point I got frustrated and sowed the whole of a new packet, resulting in 11 plants (I wanted 5 - 2 in the greenhouse, 2 in the growhouse and 1 for my friend). I planted 2 of the remainder in place of the 2 sungold, 2 in pots near the hedge (which isn't really sunny enough) an extra one in the greenhouse and an extra one at my friend's. So far from the 11 plants I have harvested ONE tomato and that has blossom end rot! The plants in the growhouse (in 11 litre pots on self watering trays) have been particularly unhappy, they are a strange paleish purple colour and several fruit have developed small brown specks and then fallen off while still very small. The 4 extra plants outside have 2 green tomatoes each, the ones in the greenhouses are doing somewhat better, but are very late.
Oh Happy Day - big, chunky blight resistant plants with (usually) large numbers of big chunky tomatoes. I have had 100 tomatoes from 1 plant in a good year. I normally grow 2. Flavour is moderate, but useful for sauces and freezing in bulk.
More germination problems, after the first 2 failed I sowed 4 more and ended up with 3. These took a dislike to the compost I was using (as did some of the Ferline) and started dropping leaves so that however many they had produced, the plants had only 4. I renamed them Unhappy Day and banished them to the allotment growhouse to take their chances. They had to wait in their pots until there was space to plant them out. because everything else was late due to the cold spring. Eventually I planted 2 of them in the hotbed and one in the tunnel, which was not my original plan, planting them very deep because of the lack of lower leaves. They have recovered remarkably well and are starting to produce ripe fruit in the last week - this is actually a couple of weeks earlier than usual. They are also extremely unruly, partly because after I removed every sideshoot I could find, they waited until the leaves were big enough to cover the soil then produced sideshoots from underground. These were impossible to remove and I now have a dense thicket of tomato plants. How long they will survive the blight I have no idea - they do usually succumb eventually.
Crimson Crush - similar in growth habit and size to Oh Happy Day, probably slightly less blight resistant and slightly more flavour, but interchangeable.
Sowed 2 seeds from a very old packet in desperation after problems with various other varieties. One germinated. This was planted next to Oh Happy Day in the hotbed and has been slightly less unruly. First tomato ripened a few days earlier than Oh Happy Day, but that could have been because it is at the sunniest end of the bed.

[MelanieSW]

Of the standard size toms, Bloody Butcher was early (comparatively - everything was delayed this year) and reliably tasty again. One of my mainstays.
I also have some 3rd generation Kumato plants which are still quite close to type and most importantly taste good.
I also grew Garden Peach again, as I'm quite fond of it. Not terribly exciting this year, but that may be the location right at the back in a not particularly sunny position.
Still waiting for Demidov to ripen, they are in containers, some blossom end rot but that may be my watering regime. Roughwood Golden Plum is a beautiful bush with lots of good looking fruit, however all still green as well.

Plums - Roma are only just coming on so can't say much yet. My Principe Borghese were not really plum shaped, more round, but good flavour, and seamlessly took over from the Bloody Butcher, may grow again.

Beefsteak - I've settled in on Raspberry Oxheart, there are always some misshapen fruits that act as snail attractants, but overall always quite good taste and I had some beautiful big fruits this year.

Cherry - chocolate cherry nice and tasty as usual. Petit Moineau is one I may also grow again, fruits were nice and sweet. Blush is one I grow more for the looks than taste which is middling at best, but they're so pretty.

[Penellype]

Cherry - chocolate cherry nice and tasty as usual.

Interesting - I tried Chocolate Cherry a few years back and thought it was tasteless. It could be the way I grew it I suppose, although I can't remember exactly what I did.

For next year I have discovered a new variety, Honeycomb (Suttons) which is like Sungold but apparently less prone to splitting (which I do find is a problem with Sungold). I intend to try it alongside Sungold for comparison.

[Babru]

Everything was late ripening here too. I've had some winners and some also-rans.

Winners:

Glacier, which I grow mostly because it produces earlier than others, it's bigger than a cherry, and it's a fairly compact plant. I picked 3.5 lbs yesterday off two greenhouse plants. I think the flavour is reasonable.

Sungold, splits as Penellype says, but very sweet and early to produce.

Gardener's Delight, my favourite for flavour. The plant on the south east side of the greenhouse has produced more and tastier fruit than the one on the other side, which isn’t always the case - more sun presumably.

Tigerella, lots of big fruit, a few splitters, but very attractive in a salad and an acceptable flavour.

Tumbling Tom Red in a big pot in full sun outside. Produced lots of fruit of a good flavour.

Maskotka in a big pot outside next to Tumbling Tom. My first time growing this, and I'm impressed. Loads of fruit, bigger than Tom, good flavour. Only issue is that it has very long trailing stems. I put it in my tallest pot and it's still spreading over the ground. I was concerned that the snails might go for the fruit but there has been minimal damage. I just need to figure how I could grow it higher up - a pot on a stand or something, but it can be quite windy here, so I'm not sure.

Also-ran:

Ailsa Craig - I wasted two greenhouse pots on this one. Not many fruit, more lost to BER than have come to fruition, though it's growing in the same self watering pots on a reservoir as all the others in the greenhouse.

Next year: all of the above apart from Ailsa Craig. I like to try new varieties and think I may try Crimson Crush and Black Cherry, as it came out top in the taste test at my local allotment show, and I like different colours.

Interested to hear your experience with Balconi Red, Pennellype. I tried it once and though the flavour was average. I've grown windowsill types in the past, Venus and Tiny Tim and both did ok.

The Beechgrove grew some dwarf tomatoes this year in 7 inch pots. They liked Tiny Tim for taste, then Sweet and Neat, which was the second best cropper. They also liked the flavour of Tiny Tiger, which was stripey with much larger fruit. Verandah Red was first to crop, Fat Frog last to crop, and not very sweet. Heartbreaker produced the most, but the flavour wasn't great.

I think I'll have an early go at Sweet and Neat and Tiny Tiger, if I can get seeds.

[Mark Rand]

Because I was away from home until the start of June, I had to go with what plants the garden centre had. Sweet Million are acceptable, but not as good as Sweet Success, which is my recent red cherry tomato favorite.

Both Alicante and Moneymaker are tasteless and watery. Might be better if allowed to become more ripe and starved of water, but I've only had two of each ripen so far after the late start.

Looking forward to sowing seeds next January.

[Bren In Pots]

A link to the new 2024 thread.

Tastiest Toms for 2024 - The Grapevine (growfruitandveg.co.uk)