Garden: Rating the Tomatoes

Tomatoes

2015 Review of the Harvest

Many thanks to those good folks on the Grapevine for suggesting a thread for rating our 2015 tomatoes. Although I make what I think are extensive notes in my Garden Book - dates for sowing, planting out, first harvest, blight attack etc - it often appears garbled and nonsensical when I come around to planning the potager for the following year. 

So I thought I'd bung my results down here and invite other tomato growers to come along and share their thoughts, too. Plus we can all go off and see what the members of the Grapevine have been growing and how they rate those different varieties.

First up plum tomatoes - the varieties for bottling, drying and storing.

San Marzano

Healthy and vigour 7/10
Taste 8/10
Grow Again? Probably

Truss of San Marzano - huge tomatoes (a little under 60g), but only a few per truss.

Roma

Healthy and vigour 8/10
Taste 7/10
Grow Again? Probably

I swap back and forth between Roma and SM as the toms are bigger on the SM but the yield is actually better on the Roma. Both are used for bottling and sauce making. The SM plants have made about shoulder height this year while the Roma are up and over my head and now running horizontally along the frame!

Truss of Roma (smaller, weighing in at about 32-3g)

San Marzano (L) and much smaller Roma

Prince Borghese

I grow this little plum exclusively for sun-drying, although if I have lots of fruit and no sun it goes in the bottling factory! Delicious dried, we often just chew them from the jar throughout the winter, and it looks lovely with a deep red colour and slight heart shape.

Healthy and vigour 8/10
Taste10/10
Grow Again? Yes

Prince Borghese, easily identified by the little point on the base.

The following are the giants for stuffing and slicing.

Marmande

Healthy and vigour 5/10
Taste 8/10
Grow Again? Yes

Almost always the first plant to get blight but unrivalled for taste as a slicing tomato. Excess gets bottled along with the two plum types.

St Pierre

My stuffing tomato – plants do go down with blight soon after the Marmande but until then they are excellent, very fleshy so there is little room for stuffing much in, sweet but not overly so and the skin is strong enough to hold the whole thing together during cooking. Love it!

Healthy and vigour 6/10
Taste 9/10
Grow Again? Yes

Next up the cherry tomatoes for lunch, salsas and snacking in the garden.

Gardener’s Delight

Always reliable, pretty early into crop and I like the balance of flavour with a tart kick.

Healthy and vigour 9/10
Taste /10
Grow Again? Yes

Black Cherry

Second year on this one; late into fruit and the fruits themselves have been very watery, odd considering we’ve had a drought and the plum types all had blossom end rot at the start of the cropping season. Also rotting on the vine. Last year they were abundant and great – just add vodka and you have a Bloody Mary they were so sweet and spicy.

Healthy and vigour 6/10
Taste 6/10 last year 9/10
Grow Again? Undecided

Sungold

What’s not to like? First to crop. Beautiful sweet and robust fruit, refreshingly perfect in a packed lunch on a long walk.

Healthy and vigour 9/10
Taste 10/10
Grow Again? Yes, despite the cost of this F1!

And the others ...

Green Zebra

Horrible pappy flavourless flesh and even when picked green and hard last year for pickling, still disintegrated. Free seeds which is why I tried again this year!

Healthy and vigour 6/10
Taste 2/10
Grow Again? No

Ola Polka

Small yellow fruit on weak plants that have already died for no obvious reason. Did initially grow fast and early to fruit, but the tomatoes are thin yet hard skinned and the flesh very pappy.

Healthy and vigour 3/10
Taste 2/10
Grow Again? No

At the time of writing it is the last weekend in August and although the cherry tomatoes have slowed production and the Marmande and St Pierre almost finished there are still plenty of plums to come. I hope the blight and early frosts stay away. We've had the biggest haul of plums for passata since we started growing here in 2010.

Please note -  

All tomatoes are grown outdoors.

The summer temperature in this patch of south west France is normally mid 20s at the coolest and often in the high 30s with low 40s achieved this year.

We have a long season, with plants in the ground at the end of April this year.