Tomato Growing 2025

A photo 3 days ago.
Today I moved the biggest 16 into square 10 cm pots and will start bringing them into greenhouse for daylight from tomorrow. Nights at home so far.
I have one fluffy variety this year Extravagante Rouffiange.
Overall all but 1 variety (shop bought hybrid) germinated.

 

And Fat Frog sown in February inside:

 

So, the re-sowing/extras list is:

Ambrosia Gold
Cherry Roma
Datlo F1
"Fat Sl*gs" (my Viz-inspired nickname for my pink mystery beef)
Figiel
Haley's Sweet Mystery
Jaune Flammée
Millefleurs
Montrichard (a little striped, oval cherry I liberated from a plant in the town of that name)
Orange Bourgoin Not (sold as an off-type Orange Bourgoin)
Pink Princess
Wow Cherry

 

Same old ,same old but I grow them because we love them and they are reliable.
Coming along nicely.
Ready to be moved on.
Gardeners Delight and Shirley.

 

Those are lovely, stocky plants, @roders . Which variety is this?

 

Gardeners Delight and Shirley.

 

I learned to grow tomatoes as a child, from my dad, who always had some Gardener's Delight on the go.

 

Mine are very small

 

I've only got one plant bigger than that, my plants are for outside, and I dont see that happening for another 6 weeks or even more.

 

I want to try an old delicious Gardener's Delight strain next year.
I grew it from shop bought seeds one year, and no good taste.
Please would someone want to collect seeds and swap later in this season. I will collect seeds from my plants that will have tasty tomatoes.

 

Some are bigger than others

 

I've mentioned this before but unfortunately Gardeneres delight, suffered from over selection of seed from a restricted number of stock plants. Some years ago the RHS removed the AGM, status as a trial showed it had lost a lot of characters that had made it so popular. In the meantime Some seed companies have made efforts to re-establish better stock and seed lines. This highlights the fact that , sadly, a lot of seed is grown abroad and regardless of the name on the packet, it's all from the same source. There are still a few independent companies but it can be hard to know the true provenance of big name well known cultivars.

 

Inbreeding is a big problem for cultivars which is partly why F1s are so vigorous. Really any named variety over many decades will tend towards depression even with selection as the bad genes are invisible and recessive, at some point you have to outbreed it.

Rhe best compromise is for little diverse phenogroups where you let a handful of similar use varieties repeatedly interbreed and just collect seed from all of them, nobody does this because its harder to control and farmers dont like variation for automation and consumer reasons.

 

You can tell how long it's been since I read Viz; when I looked and went "Fat Slugs" what's wrong with that apart from tempting fate, then memory clicked in.