Cherry Tomato Harvest

Westbrook, CT(Zone 6a)

Here is a chart showing the yield per plant from my cherry tomatoes this year in Zone 6. As you can see if you click on it, Moravsky Div earned the early season honors, Riesentraube and Sungold pumped out fruit for a long time starting in midseason, and Pink PingPong and Black Cherry took over in mid-August. Actually there are still loads of fruit on the Black Cherry which may ripen before our soon-to-be expected frosts. All of these were good to eat, with Black Cherry getting the prize for best taste and biggest plant (it drooped way over the top of my 6-ft cages).

I'll grow all of these again except perhaps the Sungolds, which were very sweet but over a third of them cracked on the vine. I think I will try Sun Sugar next year instead.

The Red Pear produced a bunch of crunchy fruit that were fun to put in salads, but then declined quickly (even though the seller listed it as indeterminate) and only grew a few tiny tomatoes too small to use.

Multiplying the total yield by the average weight of each variety, SunGold and Red Pear plants grew about 41 ounces of fruit, while Pink PingPong and Moravsky Div produced about 51 ounces. Black Cherry and Riesentraube were the heavyweights with 56 and 59 oz respectively (The Riesentraube was in a 5 gallon container--it grew only about 4-5 ft high).

Thumbnail by DonShirer
Irving, TX(Zone 8a)

great study !

Salem, NY(Zone 4b)

I admire your wanting to collect all that data, I never did, and I've grown every variety you mentioned, some of them many times. But when grown by me in my upstate NY zone 5 area I can look at a list and pretty much tell you what I thought of that variety.

With over about 4,000 varieties grown to date, my first priority is taste, and always will be, second is fruit production and last is disease tolerances. And that b'c I live in upstate NY in zone 5 and the major problems here are the four most common foliage diseases, which is also true worldwide.

Seldom are the soilborne diseases such as Fusarium, Verticillium, etc, and sometimes Late Blight, P infestans, and even varieties sold, mostly but not exclusively hybrids, when they list what they say are the resistances, that's not true, they are tolerances, not totally resistant to anything.

OK, I have a clear plastic one pint container to my right filled with many different varieties of cherry tomatoes, so time for me to shut up and eat some of those.

Carolyn

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