I thought I’d take a little time to post about the variety of tomato that I have probably grown in more seasons than any other: the Galina tomato. This is a potato-leafed vine variety that produces high yields of large yellow cherry tomatoes. I have grown these every year since 2011 (making this the fifth successive year). When I first grew these I had never tried a yellow tomato before. That was part of the appeal – that year I also grew Black Cherry and Green Zebra tomatoes. Over the last couple of years I have noticed supermarkets starting to sell yellow tomatoes, but at the time I had never seen them available.
However, the main reason that I wanted to grow them was their productivity. This is a Siberian variety and having been bred in a cold climate with a short growing season, they are more tolerant of cool conditions than the average variety. They start fruiting earlier in the season, as well continuing to fruit until long after most other varieties have given up. The following photo illustrates that point, I took it on 10th November 2013 with fruit still ripening on it!
Galina tomatoes in November!
After harvesting those first fruits in 2011, I was sufficiently impressed with the high yield of fruit over a long growing season, as well the flavour and texture of these tomatoes, that I decided to save my own seeds. I had recently purchased Sue Stickland’s Back Garden Seed Saving book, and this was among my first projects. The next year I sowed seeds from both batches (the original purchased batch, and my own saved seeds), and there were no noticeable differences. The process had been successful: I was now self-sufficient in Galina tomato seeds!
In 2012 I’m sure I saved some seeds, but I can’t find them now. In 2013 I was lazy and just propagated a plant from a sideshoot at the end of the summer, and kept this indoors over winter on a windowsill. When it started to get leggy, I just pinched off another sideshoot and propagated that. Come spring 2014 I had a plant that I had effectively cloned ready to plant out. At the end of last year’s growing season I didn’t save any seeds, nor did I propagate a new plant. When we moved into this house at the beginning of May, the only seeds I could find of this variety were from the original batch and the 2011 saved seeds. I planted some of each into a propagator, but nothing came up. That was probably to be expected, they were very old by then.
However, over a month later, long after I had potted on everything else from the propagator, I noticed some seedling leaves forming. I can how happily confirm that I have some young plants from each batch. For just about any other variety of tomato that I’ve grown I’d think it was a bit late now to be planting out plants just a few centimetres high. But these aren’t a normal variety, these are Galina tomatoes. Hopefully these will extend our growing season into November again.