Yesterday my partner and I made Tomato Sauce and of course we tried all the tomatoes and made some notes. I took seed from almost all of them.
Fantasia F1: Basic tomato, nothing special, no seeds taken since I only bought it to bolster the yield of my patch
Antho Yellow Fleisch: we both found it nothing special in terms of taste, definately not bad, just not flashy. Very nice creamy meaty texture
Yellow Ribbed Fleisch: my partner liked this very much, he described it as refreshing! I also liked it but didn’t get what taste component he meant by refreshing. Anyway, a very nice meaty tomato. Negative is that the picking of the fruit is somewhat complicated, since it fruits in tresses (of 5 to seven fruit I would guess, have to look again). The upper fruit ripen faster of course. But since the fruit sit very close to the stalk and there seems to be no designated breaking point for the stalk, it is very difficult to pick the upper fruit without damaging the stalk that should feed the lower fruit.
Salmon: hard, but very thin skin, fruit on the acidic side, we both gave 5/5
Bronze: 5/5, balanced, full taste, very good
Düsterwald: 3/5 and 4/5 points given
Lycopersicum x cheesmaniae F2 by Jesse: bland, no seeds saved yet. In the wild tomato jungle many, many fruit are waiting to ripen. But either they are to shaded by the plants themselves which just grow like they want, or small animals are eating all the ripening fruit and leaving nothing. While the second seems quite likely, I can’t imangine animals eating everything so cleanly that I neven even find traces of ripening fruit. Most animals are after all, quite the messy eaters.
Generally, I regret how we planted our tomato bed. I had about 65 tomato plants (some cells I left two and broke them apart when planting them out), and then i bought about five plants for yield. We planted them much too close together, because we could simply not imagine the vigor these plants would have. All tomatoes we had up until now were more like sad little strings with little leaves left and right. They made one main stem and sad little branches. They had not enough water, nutrients and space in the pots we were forced to have them in. But now in our bed, they have the water, they have the nutrients, and even if above ground conditions are very crowded, they have much more root space underground than they would have in a pot. Combine this with the warm weather and we have never had tomato plants like these.
So, these plants are absolute monsters, at least 10 side branches per plant, more like twenty, branches as think as a farmers thumb, rambling, fighting for space and light, climbing over each other, swooping down to the ground and climbing up again. It is pure chaos. Theoretically, each plant has a stake, a some we bound with strings back to the wall, but is never enough and now we can barely get in.
And to make matters worse, the seven Lycopersicum x cheesmaniae F2 plants I left free to ramble about on one side of the bed in front. They spread, and spread and spread and if I want to reach the plants behind, I have to wade through them. As if this was not enough the pole beans have left the poles, are binding the tomatoes together and are looking for world domination.
The two courchette plants at the ends of the row are somewhat more restrained, but also take up more space than thought. In the cool and wet summer of 2025, our courchette made one fruit all summer and had propably never more than 10 leaves. This summer, we have already picked more than 10 fruit per plant and they take up more than a square meter on the ground and are using the space very efficiently by also using the tomatos as a trellis.
And then lastly, the two zuchetti my mother planted pump out fruit like crazy, which is great. What is less great is how they don’t let me access probably three meters of the bed, because everywhere I would like to stand, there is either an leaf or a stem! And if I find a place to stand down betwenn the leaves, they attack me with their very scratchy leaves.
So, all in all, harvesting is an adventure.
Plans for next year:
- Two instead of three rows of tomatoes. Plants in a diamond grid
- No extra stuff in front of the tomatoes except basil and other herbs
- Make a second bed for the courchettes, the zuchetti, the wild tomatoes
- Put the pole beans somewhere completely different.
