comparing tom varieties - quality, taste and yield

HappyIdiotTalk

nicola.williams wrote: »

Just read this thread and then went out to check my one and only tomato plant. It's a 'tumbling tom red' and it's in a hanging basket at the side of my back door where it gets some shelter. I've just counted and I've got over 150 tomatoes so far. The first one is just starting to turn red. It's still flowering and there are lots of little ones just starting. I'm really pleased.

I've also got a chilli plant on the windowsill in my garden room (like a conservatory but with a proper roof!) and that has about 40 chillis so far (not sure of the variety it just says finger chillies (hot)).

I feel like a market gardener! :j

150 off one plant? What variety is it? I will have to try it in a hanging basket of my own next year.

NJW69

It just says 'tumbling tom red'! so I presume that is the variety.

HappyIdiotTalk

Can anyone confirm if thats normal? I assumed most tomato plants would yield a few dozen fruits at most.

foreign_correspondent

HappyIdiotTalk wrote: »

Can anyone confirm if thats normal? I assumed most tomato plants would yield a few dozen fruits at most.

depends on the variety - cherry tomatoes do tend to have a high yield. I have no idea how many in numbers I get off one plant - but much more than a few dozen, over the whole season.

MissMoneypenny

I picked about 20 of the beefsteak Black Krim tomatoes yesterday as they are coming thick and fast now. Some of the skins had split (it said on the internet that this is due to uneven watering - guilty as charged!). I fried some onoins and garlic in olive oil and then added the chopped tomatoes and simmered it all for a few minutes and then added some fresh basil. It made a sweet tasting tomato base and I put the sauce into pots and put them in the freezer, to be added to mince at a later date.

What suprised me was how easy these Black Krims are to peel. None of that putting in boiling water or holding over a flame, to make the skin easier to peel. Not that I peeled them for the sauce, but I might make tomato soup with them next and want them peeled for that.

I have passed a few over to neighbours and they all liked them too, so it's not just me:-)

I picked another Black Krim for my lunch today:-) It weighed 314g. Yes, I am that sad that I weighed it.

Primrose

I've got a few Black Russians which have also split. I bought 3 seedlings from a car book sale and am still trying to work out whether Black russian tomatoes are the same as Black Krim, or whether they're two difference varieties.

foreign_correspondent

two varieties Primrose, I think.

I have just picked my first white queen tomato - its quite a nice shaped white beefsteak (creamy yellow in colour) - with your eyes closed it tastes pretty much like a red tomato... but still prefer the smaller toms over the beefsteak though!

furndire

At long last my tomatoes are actually starting to ripen.
I don't know if its coincidence, but put two or three banana skins in the greenhouse, and its the toms nearest to them which are ripening.
I sort of thought bananas ripen up avocados, and other fruit, so thought I would give it a try as the ethylene given off might start the ripening process.

Lotus-eater

Did anyone see "what to eat now" on BBC2 last night?

He went to see some lady who grew 50 different types of tomatoes and stated I mean to find the best tasting tomato, so I watched with interest and all the idiot says, is that sweet million don't taste very nice ..... and no mention of anything else :rolleyes: saw him eating alot of fruit and sayign how lovely they are, but no mention of what they were. To be fair he did mention a couple of black ones very briefly.

I want some advice on small container tomatoes. I've gone through red and yellow tumbler, grown garden pearl this year and again been unhappy about the taste of all of them. There doesn't seem to be one bush tomato I can grow in big pots that I love eating. Varieties gratefully will be assessed

Primrose

Lotus-eater. I've just caught up with it on BBC IPLayer and like you, was terribly disappointed. Here was an opportunity, with somebody growing 50 different varieties of tomatoes, to have provided a real professional comparison, naming the varieties as they were tasted and giving an explanation. All we got was some showy chef muttering "Delicious, Amazing" etc, but with no descriptions of actual flavour. Another case where the programme could have been really educational, and it failed completely. Now if we could have had an RHS judge doing that programme, it would have been completely different and we might all have learned something useful about which tomato varieties we might want to try growing. Another case of BBC dumbing down I'm afraid. Alas I can't give you much help with container tomatoes. So far I've only grown Tumbler Red and Tumbler Yellow, neither of which have exceptional flavours. Of the cherry types, Gardeners Delight is still my favourite so far for flavour. It would be lovely if a grower could somehow reproduce it in a tumbling form, rather than an upright as it's rather too tall to grow successfully in pots. I certaintly won't be growing "Cherry" again. I was given some surplus seedlings but the tomatoes are absolutely tiny, and not a good yield for the growing space taken up. Gardeners delight, which admittedly is a larger cherry size tomato, provides double the yield for the same amount of space, which is an important factor for me, with flavour, when space is limited.