Tomato taste test 2020

Please post your experiences here and which varieties you would recommend.

For my taste Sungold and Gardener's Delight were the outright winners this season. Honeymoon was new for me, it yielded well and is tasty for a beefsteak type.

Rated out of 10 for TASTE : RIPENING TIME (earliness) : YIELD

Sungold F1: Taste 10 : Earliness 10 : Yield 6 : Soft & sweet, suffers from split
Gardener's Delight 2005 strain: Taste 10 : Earliness 4 : Yield 8 : Tangy taste
Honey Moon: Taste 9 : Earliness 5 : Yield 9 : Good taste, blight resistant, prolific
Floridity F1: Taste 9 : Earliness 7 : Yield 9 : Firm and Tangy, many splits
Gardener's Delight 2012 strain: Taste 9 : Earliness 8 : Yield 8 : tangy taste
Black Cherry: Taste 8: Earliness 7 : Yield 8 : Savoury
Suncherry: Taste 7 : Earliness 8 : Yield 6 : Sweet and Tangy
Golden Sunrise: Taste 7 : Earliness 8 : Yield 7 : Soft, Mellow
New Girl F1: Taste 6 : Earliness 6 : Yield 3 : Thick skinned
Oh Happy Days: Taste 5 : Earliness 2 : Yield 2 : Blight resistant - poor yield
Magic Mountain F1: Taste 4 : Earliness 6 : Yield 8 : Blight resistant but bland
Cocktail Crush: Taste 3 : Earliness 8 : Yield 8 : Blight resistant but bland




Next year I won't be growing the bland ones: Cocktail Crush, Magic Mountain nor
"Oh Happy Days"

 

Interesting!
Are you growing in a greenhouse, or outside? I’m interested in finding a good “large” tomato variety. Honeymoon sounds the business!

We are happy with how our own yellow pear tomatoes (great yield and taste, though they can split if heavy rain after a period of drought), and tumbling Tom red - a reliable container tomato to grow in the large trough under the kitchen window, started off with the soil warmed with a cloche.
The only “large” tomato we have tried is gardeners delight, but it suffered badly from blight. 2016 was a damp summer, and there were potatoes grown in the field on the other side of the valley. Potatoes there again this summer, but this time it was the potatoes that failed, due to the drought, rather than our toms. The farmer hasn’t even tried to lift the crop!

 

Been quite a good year for toms, for consumption I grow only 5 varieties each year but sometimes a couple of new varieties to try, agree with JKW, will not be growing cocktail crush or crimson crush again, ok for sandwich slices, but bland, as I tend to like my Toms with a Brix rating of 8 to 10, and had good crops from the following:
Sungold, Floridity, Roma, moneymaker, Shirley, and this year tried a few others cocktail and crimson crush, where no, a beefsteak called orange wellington, no, and a cherry plum Sanantonio, which was great tasting, had thick skin, on par with Floridity, but no splitting, so may try it again next year, bumper year on chilli's too.

 

Mine werent as sweet and tasty as in other years, perhaps due lack of sunshine, plus they were splitting at the end of season something I've never had before.

Only 1 tomato ripened.

 

Cannot compete with the many varieties and details of @JWK

Also a bit puzzled by the Gardeners Delight references to Year Strains ? saving your own seeds or ones you can by from a specialist supplier ?

We started off G Delight, Shirley and Tumbling Tom in the greenhouse but had to put them all outside as needed space for other plants.

Gardeners Delight as a cordon in a pot gave great taste, better than what we usually get from growing them inside ? The Yield was also very good.

Shirley , usually so reliable, was a disaster, like GD in a pot as a cordon, a good yield but they took ages to ripen and then the flesh was really hard, not really edible, not for salads anyway.

Tumbling Tom trailing /bush, again always a good cropper and good taste, though the skins a bit tough this year.

 

Sown on 7th March and kept under growlamps or outdoors on the patio during sunny days. Planted in my unheated greenhouse soil with wilted comfrey and mychorizal fungi on 17th May. Started picking Sungold on 11th June. Are varieties are still all producing fruit, having slowed down with the colder nights.

I am very pleased with Honeymoon as I've never had much success with beefsteak varieties before.

 

I will try that variety next year instead of Floridity, thanks @Cuttings :

Kings Seeds - Tomato Vegetable Seeds | A leading supplier of vegetable seeds in Essex, UK | Grow your own vegetable seeds - kingsseeds.com

 

Yes a bit obscure, this is referring to a project a few of us did a couple of years ago to revive that good old favourite Gardener's Delight.

Gardener's Delight Tomato Seed Germination and Growing Thread

That is a very long thread, to save you reading it here is a summary:

Over the past few years many of us have noticed that the taste of GD has dropped from being amongst the very best to bland and not worth bothering with.

This is a bit OCD but I keep notes each year of my various tomatoes, this is Gardener's Delight:
2016 4/10 F1 French 'Improved' strain £7 for 15 seeds! - Taste: 2nd last
2015 3/10 - "bland and watery"
2014 4/10 - "A bit bland"
2013 6/10 - "Sweet and juicy, variable ripening"
2012 8/10 - 3rd best - "Sweet and juicy has been prolific and early"
2011 "badly attacked by grey mould, affected the taste"
2010 8/10 - 2nd best "Sweet firm and tangy"
2008 10/10 First place for taste "Sweet firm and tangy"

I didn't keep notes before 2008 but recall GD was always my favourite for earliness, taste and yield.

A few of us had old packets of seeds and luckily @Scrungee had a packet from 2005 which proved to have the best taste.

@ricky101 if you would like some seed from the 2005 strain PM me your address and I'll send you some. I managed to collect more this year. I grew my GD 2005 plants in a separate small greenhouse (isolated from other varieties) specifically to harvest the seed.

 

I've found growing outside improves the flavour of all varieties, but I have lost them all to blight the last few years, so only grow in the greenhouse now.

Funny how they vary year to year, not just Shirley but other varieties too, I think it shows the importance of growing a few different varieties to hedge your bets.

 

Just recently, I have been thinking about using a spare glasshouse to grow Toms, cucumber, peppers and chilli for retail to the public, so went to see a friend of mine that has a Chilli farm just outside Bristol, whilst there I tried some of his Toms, and was surprised at the excellent flavour of his gardeners delight. During a long conversation about maintaining the flavour of the GD tom and supermarmande beefsteak, his answer was the following, consistancy abd make up of the, and the compost, and the control of chemical feed, with the importance of controlling the P and K, which can be unique to each variety, so some varieties given too much K at a certain point will increase the acidity, too much K, and it can effect the ripening times, below is a pdf from a few years ago, thats a bit more indepth, but is a paper on commercial growing, which may help explain.

 

@Cuttings, interesting pdf though not quiet sure how to apply that info to our domestic greenhouse growing ?

Did your friend suggest a particular compost and feeding regime for your toms ?

 

No, he uses the same compost as myself, the message is trial and error, but as with all experiments, you need consitancy, in the soil, in the feed, in artificial lighting if used. Which can be a problem for the home gardener purchasing the products widely available on the market, which are produced according to commodity prices of raw ingredients, so profit to the producer is of more importance than consistancy in the product, and this is compounded the cheaper you go.you will not get consistancy, unless you have a consistant baseline.
A quick couple of questions,
How many gardeners that purchase the same brand of compost every year, do soil PH tests on said compost regularly?
How many gardeners read and understand the NPK on purchsed fertilisers regularly?

With regards to the compost, Bulrush professional growing media, most have not heard of it, but its used by most professional growers, and those who supply products for RHS plant show gardens.

 

Good points, but would have thought we could have complied some sound basics to ensure better and more consitent diy crops ?

 

Thankyou for your kind offer , we would indeed like to a few of this older GD vintage .
Pm sent.

 

But they used to taste good years ago, simply by planting in the ground wherever you lived, without all that suggested palaver, so something has obviously changed.

The only growers who would ordinarily be interested in all that stuff would normally be only commercial growers and amateurs growing for competitions.