Surprise Surprise

In the three years I've been growing tomatoes from seed, I always seem to get at least one or two surprises each year.

Last year I grew what I thought was Isis Candy from seed, but instead of fruit with red-orange-gold marbling, I got perfectly round 1" red cherry tomatoes. Since the fruit turned out to be very sweet, almost as sweet as Sungold, especially near the end of the season, I saved the seed to grow out this year. I grew two plants from seed saved from the surprise plant (that I now call "NOT Isis Candy"), but only one of the plants seems to be producing the same type of fruit as last year. The fruit are 1-1.5" in diameter and have the same green shoulders and marbling before breaking color. The second plant seems to be producing fruit with lighter coloring.

 The fruit on one "NOT Isis Candy" plant are similar to last year's fruit

The second "NOT Isis Candy" plant is producing much lighter fruit

Cherokee Purple has always been my favorite large tomato, so I've grown Cherokee Purple from saved seed the past two years. This year's plant is much more prolific than the last two years, but the fruit is much smaller in size, similar to Black and Red Boar. By late July, this "Cherokee Purple" plant had 31 fruit set larger than 1 cm in diameter, but the largest fruit was only about 1.5" in diameter, compared to the larger fruit that were 2.5"-3.5"on Spudakee, Vorlon, and Paul Robeson. 

By July 29th Cherokee Purple with 31 fruit set, the largest being 1.5" in diameter