Kitchen Garden Forum

This is my first solo venture with tomato growing.

I am trying Gardeners Delight but I am not sure whether to take out the side shoots.
This was always my late dads rule with the older types, but he never grew cherry tomatoes.

Help please.

Yes, remove the side shoots for the best crop.

Nice tomato that I grow most years.

HTH

Jerry

I always let GD grow fairly wild - you get more tomatoes this way and it doesn't seem to overly affect the fruit size.

We find that if you grow them first, religiously pinching out the side-shoots to the top of the greenhouse 'sides', then you can let them go a bit more wild after that.
That way, you get your early ones without losing energy producing side-shoots, then, once they've cropped well, you get the 'forever after pickings' till Christmas along the roof-bit.
Coz if you've got a variety of Tomatoes growing (we've got SuperMarmande II, Romano Plum cordon, Ferline, Sungold Cherry and Gardeners Delight Cherry) they'll all be giving you ripe tomatoes of different sorts at different times of the summer....

And THE benefit, I feel, of the cherry toms, is that they take such little time from pollination to harvest, unlike the bigger toms, so can go on and on, given the right conditions - without any thought of green tomato chutney. (I completely loathe most chutneys unfortunately....! not something I'm proud of...but hey, we can't all like the same thing!)

Lots of Luck,
Wellie

I would not class Gardeners Delight as a cherry, it is indeterminate i.e. cordon. I grew it several years ago twice as a trial, it didn't make it to my short list , all right for home use but rather inconsistent on fruit size, not salad size nor cherry-size. This year I happened to buy two plants as I was worried about the poor germination of my main sowing. From those plants I rooted the first 7 sideshoots successfully and they too are now planted. The parent plants are now up to third truss and should give us the first taste of homegrown for this year. An obvious choice for saving your own seeds as it is O-P.
Allan

Allan,
If you grow Gardeners Delight as a bush rather than a cordon they can only be classed as Cherry Tomatoes
because of the size and I have a friend in the village who prefers them that way and she always has absolutely masses of tomatoes.
I know that they are Gardeners Delight and no other, by mistake, because I grow them for her and her plants were taken at random from mine.
I do the same as Wellie and have eaten wonderfully small sweet tomatoes on Christmas Day. (in the tunnel)
I know that you prefer the sweet and super sweet varieties but I actually find those not to my liking and of all tomatoes I have tried GD seem to hit my target and very consistently

I'll have to check my catalogue. I always thought that Gardeners Delight was a determinate and always grown it as such. It is my main tomato as I eat them like sweets every time I pass.
Pete

So far my 2 plants have several trusses each and are still growing upwards, all sideshoots have been removed.
It looks from the replies as if Gardeners Delight doesn't know quite what it is, and tries to be all things to all people, or perhaps not quite. The seedsmen on the web mostly say indeterminate, but Seeds by Size and Chiltern differ.I'll treat some of the rooted sideshoots as bush and see what happens. It certainly looks as if variability is in its nature. Come to that I have seen a lot of variability in various tomato varieties, trusses from the middle of leaves, fasciation and other peculiar growths.
The worst was when I grew a batch of Sungold from T & M seeds and half turned out red and of various sizes, I complained but didn't get a reply, I grew some of the seeds on for 4 years, got a mixed bag of results so couldn't fix the strain and none were worth growing so I now get Sungold elsewhere.
Allan

As someone who first helped to popularise this variety some 35 or more years ago in a series of Garden News articles I can say that Gardeners Delight was definitely indeterminate then and still is. Obviously, like most tomatoes, it will vary in fruit size and the way it grows depending on conditions, but I have never found it variable in flavour. Others may be slightly sweeter or sharper, but the blend of the 2 in GD is just about perfect.

Got any ripe ones yet?
Wellie

Hi Colin,
Of course Gardeners Delight is meant to be an indeterminate variety and some people religiously stop the plant after four or maybe five trusses. I never bother to stop the plants and then never take any side shoots out after the 5th truss has set and they then grow like a jungle thereafter and the net result is masses of very small cherry sized tomatoes which as you say may vary in size but never in flavour.
My friend in the village was growing GD when her husband had a stroke and thereafter she never managed to take any sideshoots out and the result was masses of very small tomatoes. Because she and her husband like the taste of GD and the small tomatoes she has grown them incorrectly ever since as a bush. Neither Wellie or myself has said that GD is a Cherry Tomato by definition. But what is the definition of a Cherry Tomato? It is surely the way that they grow and the size of the fruit and by growing GD incorrectly the result is masses of very small tomatoes which are Cherry Tomato size.
If you read Wellie's posting she states quite clearly that after taking the side shoots out religiously she lets them go and I do exactly the same.
The trouble here is that Allan did not read Wellie's posting properly before he went into a tizz.
Niether Wellie or myself have sought to even suggest that GD is anything other than indeterminate. It would appear that Peat has always grown them that way. If you read this Peat can you please tell us what size of fruits you get on your GD tomatoes.
However all this is not answering Moira's question.
Moira you must be, by now, thoroughly bewildered with what you should do. The correct way to grow Gardeners Delight is to remove the side shoots as your father did. They are Small Tomatoes rather than Cherry tomatoes. But if you have not taken the side shoots out then they do grow like a cherry variety
with masses of small tomatoes but sadly some people fail to read the replies properly and then the replies go haywire and the original questioner gets left high and dry. This is exactly what Jerry said in the first place!!

That's all as maybe, why you couldn't have said all that in the first place is beyond me. However I have been experimenting to get commercially acceptable cherry tomatoes for longer than you might think, and there is a right size. I have tried quite a number of varieties including determinate and you have a number of criteria. Uniformity, acceptable size and optimum flavour. The trials yielded a number of varieties which cropped extremely heavily, most were too small to bother with, management and picking were a nightmare. We realised that to manage them properly one had to go for cordon varieties and out of all this we got to the very popular Sungold, later replaced by Fothergill's Sunset, and later to Supersweet 100. Both give continuity, you don't want a glut and then nothing either at home or to sell, the flavour is excellent, heavy cropping with large trusses and there is a preponderance of the best size of fruit. However one drawback still remains to a limited extent, that is what to do with the undersize ones which you still get with any variety, They have to be picked off and discarded which can take as long as picking the usable ones, we eat some rather than waste them but they are not saleable. I therefore say that if you want the mmaximum yield of the right size and the minimum effort and wastage and crops over the longest possible period then go for a selected cordon. However if you want a variety that is widely available, cheap, seeds saveable, will still give enough with the minimum of growing effort, do what Johnboy says and use Gardeners Delight. I should mention that our surplus crop is sufficient to be frozen and gives us tomatoes of exquisite flavour throughout the rest of the year, we have just eaten the last bag of what we grew in 2005.We are still trying out new varieties and will report any outstanding discoveries as we find them.And just for comparison Gardeners Delight is being re-examined in both formats.As I have said before, horses for courses.
Allan

hi wellie, yes picked two ripe ones in the tunnel last night, yes i take the side shoots out.

Allan,
Because you do not find Gardeners Delight to your liking because it doesn't give you commercial quantities is neither here nor there.
The information that I posted to Colin is really no different to what was said in the first place.
Nobody but nobody said that GD were intended to grow as a Cherry variety and nobody said it was intended as a determinate variety (Bush) and all the kerfuffle is because you do not read the postings properly in the first place before you fly off at a tangent.
The greater majority of the contributors to this forum grow for themselves and have no commercial interest at all in selling their produce, they grow to eat.
The very small tomatoes that you manage to eat around Christmas are an absolute little bonus when everything else has died down and things are rather bleak.
With alarming regularity these flare up's appear and more often or not it is because you have either not read something properly or you have not understood what was written. I consider that what Wellie and myself wrote to be perfectly plain in their meaning.

You certainly didn't help the understanding by this phrase, I quote
"Allan,
If you grow Gardeners Delight as a bush rather than a cordon they can only be classed as Cherry Tomatoes"
The days are gone when I wished to grovel in the dirt for tomatoes and then wash them all before making any use of them, this is what goes with the idea of bush tomatoes.

Now you say that you don't treat it as a bush but as a cordon, then at some time you stop doing that.
Anyway, this tendency to grow very small tomatoes especially at the end of season is not the prerogative of Gardeners Delight, my chery tomatoes do it, as I have already pointed out and for all that I can remember just about any other indeterminate tomato does it.When I picked commercial greenhouse tomatoes in my schooldays many years ago I was instructed to only pick the decent sized, pollinated tomatoes and I used to consider it fair play to pick the small, unpollinated tomatoes in my bag as they would have been wasted anyway. I soon learnt that these had the best flavour, particularly because of lack of pips but these had the full ripening of summer and not the dull days of Autumn which is what the Christmas ones would get.
We don't eat very small tomatoes around Christmas,
If we want any to keep around Christmas we could eat the later ripeners but my experience is that by then they haven't got any real flavour or sweetness, regardless of variety. The earlier small ones, any mis-shapes, damaged and over-ripe are processed to make juice for the kitchen, You can't escape the fact that most people want a reasonable size fruit, not too big and not too small, this is true whether you grow your own or buy from any shop. You can certainly get that from any indeterminate cherry variety, whether GD which is not normally a cherry-size can give that to the same extent has yet to be found out by my trials unless you care to quote from your own experience. As I thought I made clear the choice is for the home grower to make, all I can do is present the facts as clearly as I know how.
Allan