[Fleecewife]

Each year I try to grow one new variety as well as my old favourites.
My tomatoes are raised from seed indoors in a heated propagator with grow lights. They are grown on after the last frosts in an unheated polytunnel, at 1000' in Southern Scotland.  Usually our weather is wet, cold and windy in summer.  This year has been a drought and water shortage for most of the tomatoes' growing season, and a heat wave so their watering may not have been perfect, but they have never run dry and this year are ripening quickly and well.


My old favourites are:
Sakura which is blight tolerant, a very prolific cropper, which I don't side shoot, so I have 8' tall plants with many stems and laden with fruit. Delicious large-cherry sized fruit although the skins can be a bit thick. Can go on producing some fruit until almost Christmas
 
Mountain Magic which has a full sized fruit, is blight resistant and crops a little later than Sakura. I try to side shoot this one but it often has side shoots I missed. Tasty firm fruit.  The plants are usually about 4' tall, but this year they are about 5-6'.


This year I found two new blight resistant varieties and decided to try them both:


Cocktail Crush is bred to be blight resistant and should be about 4' tall but is about 5-6' tall this year. Again I have tried to side shoot this variety but it has other ideas and is already setting fruit on some side shoots I missed. The fruits are full sized, prolifically set and very tasty.  I prefer my tomatoes slightly under ripe and these are crisp, firm and delicious.


Follia plum: This variety is again bred for blight resistance. It has produced heavy clusters of long, pointed, plum shaped tomatoes for soups and sauces which are ripening now (in previous years I have never had successful ripening of plum tomatoes).  As I picked my first few fruits today I don't know what the taste is like.  The only negative comment I have is that Follia seems a little prone to blossom end rot, which has not affected the other varieties and is not something I have ever had in my plants before.


The first 3 varieties were sown into a heated propagator with grow lights on March 8th but Follia was not sown until March 16th. All were planted out in raised beds in the tunnel on May 9th at 2 months except 3 Sakura plants which were planted out into tunnel soil some time later. After that they have all had the same treatment: watering, feeding, tying in, some side shooting except Sakura and de-leafing.


I am delighted with the new varieties I have grown and find they compare favourably with my old favourites.  At the end of the season when the whole crop is harvested then I shall decide which varieties to grow next year - Cocktail crush will certainly be one of them.  Perhaps the weather this year has not been typical for this part of Scotland, so I shall repeat the experiment next year to compare under more typical circumstances.




I thought it would be interesting to see which tomato varieties people have grown, especially any newly trialled ones and how they are finding the results.

[macgro7]

Lovely!
I missed the window of opportunity to plant tomatoes from seed thus year so instead bought plants from a garden center - 10 different varieties.

All planted in the polytunnel - all tied to bamboo sticks (except for 1 which is bush variety - don't like those tbh).

Unfortunately... my silly goat has got in the polytunnel and broke all the tomato plants... they have since grown back, but I'm still to see ripe fruits - at the moment all still green or only flowering 

Courgettes and cucumbers, on the other hand, are growing beautifully!

[Fleecewife]

Oh no  .  At least tomatoes will grow back and give you some sort of crop.
Wonderful to be able to try 10 varieties though.


For me, it was the cucurbits which never got planted out so no cucumbers, courgettes or squashes for us this year.  The plus side of gardening is that (please Fates)  there's always next year to try again and meanwhile we can enjoy what we've got.