My tomato plants did exceedingly well this year! Just as a reminder, I planted:
- 4x Stupice Tomatoes (in photo: larger red tomato)
- 2x Sweet Cherry Hybrid (oblong orangey cherry tomatoes)
- 2x Sunsugar (small yellow cherry tomatoes)
Everyone was extremely impressed by the extremely sweet Sunsugars. A friend of mine said she couldn't eat store-bought tomatoes anymore thanks to these!
The Hybrids were...good. I'm sure if I hadn't grown Sunsugars, I would be impressed; but because I did, I found them to be...mediocre; sweet, yes, but just not extraordinary.
Similarly, I was not impressed by the Stupice tomatoes. I should have read the label more carefully when it described the size of the fruits. Their flavour was bland, their texture was unremarkable and everything about them was... underwhelming. Especially their size. I don't think I will plant this again next year.
One Stupice plant produced oblong fruits, reminding me of Roma tomatoes:
The hybrid kind of scared me with how many fruits it would put out on a single vine. It seemed so unnatural:
I absolutely loved the colour of the Sunsugars. Here, they're not quite ripe yet; they turn a luscious golden yellow-orange when ready; and if you leave them on the vine even a day longer, the colour deepens and intensifies--as does the flavour!
I always preferred to err on the side of "over-ripe" than under-ripe, but found it so hard to resist--even under ripe tomatoes were sweet and juicy!
I'll post more on end-of-season cleanup later, but I just have to mention: by the time heavy frost came, some of these plants were over eight feet tall--even with a secondary main stem!
After my plants got over 5 ft tall, I stopped cutting off side-shoots/suckers. The fruits would be too tall for me to harvest comfortably after that.
I think next year, I should snip the main stem at 5 ft, and let one secondary stem grow. This year, I let too many side shoots grow, which greatly slowed fruit production.
I found these tomatoes to tolerate a light frost (-1 C), surprisingly. After the first few light frosts, I feared they wouldn't survive much longer, and so cleared the two hybrid cherry tomatoes. (By this time, I had already cleared away the squashes).
But the Sunsugar and Stupice tomatoes still kept going through early October!
Here are some tomatoes from 9 Oct. Gardening slowed down with schoolwork, and my mom took over most of the work, harvesting every second or third day.
I want to title these photos: "Forbidden Fruit" because the Stupice looks just so temptingly, yet so banefully red; and the Sunsugars, though very ripe and deep orange, look kind of sad in the dimming light, and with the chicken wire, seem almost to be imprisoned. Or maybe not--you tell me.
In mid-October (I think the 18th), a hard frost hit (-5 C and below), which stayed a few days, and I didn't get home from school early enough to cover the tomatoes before it was too dark to see. Here they are a little later (22 Oct) when I had time to frolic work in the garden again:
All in all, I was extremely satisfied with these tomatoes. I will definitely plant Sunsugar again!
Next year, I will plant larger tomatoes (larger than Stupice *grumble, grumble*), and have my eyes set on Black Krim or Purple Cherokees.
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