This page covers my experience of growing Gardeners Delight tomatoes during 2022. I’m far from an expert so I wouldn’t necessarily copy what you find here. I’ll be planting twelve plants in our small, south facing, vegetable patch. I’ve grown tomatoes before with varying degrees of success. A few years we’ve had so much fruit we don’t know what to do with it, others have given weak harvests. From memory the best harvests have been with this variety though hence it’s selection this year.
Tomatoes come in two basic cordon (aka indeterminate) or bush (aka determinate). Determinate are less work as they don’t require any pinching out or supporting but they also tend to be less productive and don’t taste as good. Indeterminate need a support framework and the side shoots need to be pinched out so the main stem develops. The benefit of indeterminate is the heavy cropping and good flavour. Gardeners Delight is strongly in the indeterminate camp but apparently can be pruned to grow like a bush but it’ll produce smaller fruit.
It seems that some people are experiencing issues with Gardeners Delight being flavourless or the wrong size. From what I can tell a few years ago now the original seed supplier stopped producing seed and so supply had to come from elsewhere. It appears the market may have been polluted with F1 hybrid varieties of Gardeners Delight which aren’t staying true to type. My seed supply claims that they have sourced seed from the original breeder so although I only have a few seeds they should be good. Gardeners Delight is an open-pollinated so we should be able to save the seed from it.
Planting
This is the plan I have for planting this year. I’ll update this with the actual dates of when things happened.
- Sow: second 12th March
- Potting On: 9th April
- Harden: 30th April
- Plant Out: 14th May