Regardless, I’ll try them next year and see how they turn out.

Regards,
Mike

Thanks for letting us know your experiences!

Sorry about the blight. You shouldn’t blame yourself for anything, because there’s not much you can do about it. It’s a big problem in lots of places these days.

I came across this thread when doing my own research on Kumatos and after conducting my own experiment, I thought I’d post a reply to tell you my results.

I saved a bunch of seeds from Kumatos (labelled with the patent by Syngenta) that I bought in a local market. I live in the northeast of the US.

I planted all of them in tiny cups at first, since I had my suspicions that they might not sprout at all.

Well, most of them sprouted! I planted them in March and transplanted them into the garden in May. THEY THRIVED! I’ve been joking all summer that I have an alien invasion in my back yard because the tomatoes have taken over.

They grew so strongly and quickly once it got good and hot out that I couldn’t keep up with staking and all. A number of them eventually toppled over (before I could buy more stakes) from the weight of the fruit.

They’ve produced dozens and dozens of greenish-brown tomatoes and they’re delicious! They’re actually still going, too. Unfortunately, I am a novice tomato grower, and didn’t know what the signs of late blight were soon enough. They’ve had a good run, and they’re still flowering and producing fruit, but I am battling this annoying fungus now.

It’s not just the Kumatos either, it’s all 6 varieties I’m growing that have been affected. The Kumatos have it the worst because I didn’t really give them a lot of space to grow, and the blight appeared after a few fell over and had to be righted again.

Oh well. It’s been an interesting and delicious run! I plan to do it again next year after learning from my mistakes.

The tomatoes were a little browner when I harvested them.

It’s true I did only grow one Kumato, but I grew about 20 other tomatoes, that for the most part all grew into the plants I was expecting them too. It’s of course not out of the question the plant I grew was somehow mutant or not right, but if these Kumato seeds are OP, I should be able to grow a mostly predictable plant.

This was truly a strange plant, with strange tomatoes. The taste was horrid! I needed quite a lot of beer to wash that away. I have also never seen a tomato shrivel up like a raisin before.

I really do stand by my conclusions here. At the same time, I’m very interested to hear from others who have similar or different experiences from me growing it. I did some searching, and I didn’t really find anyone else with a blog who had grown the tomato successfully before.

I grew only two plants this year and would hate to make big conclusions myself from just this one season and only two plants. I grew them from the SAME seed I sent you, which I harvested from a market bought tomato labelled kumato (not boxed or proprietry packaged). They look very similar to other smallish round brown/black skinned tomatoes I have seen in markets here in France and in Spain. In my experience they have had a good rich, sharp taste. Mine have a brown skin yours seem to be almost standard red. Were they brown at any point? While the plants have not been prolific and look as though they are about to succumb to blight non of my tomatoes have done well this year – a problem with the weather we had earlier and the later drying winds that wiped out all the blossoms for 2 months on most of the 20 or so varieties I’ve got this year, so not a good year to make a judgement for me. Lots of references to Kumato online suggest they are quite unique but I have not found anything unique about them yet. I plan to grow them again next year along side one I found in Barcelona which looks very similar, as I want a smallish brown skinned slicing tomato to grow regularly. If I went by this years performance alone i would not be impressed but I still hold some hope, as the original tomato I took the seeds from tasted magnificent. My dad grew them from the same seed and got a good harvest in Scotland last year.

EJ: I didn’t mean it to be too radical… The roots did something to the soil to make it very loose, probably physical. It’s possible I’ve had another tomato do the same thing before, I don’t recall. Most tomatoes get root bound eventually, causing the soil not to hold water, but this is different and earlier, as it actually caused the soil to get a little looser. More irritating than anything else…

Yes, I grew this on the same way I grow other tomatoes. About 30 liters of ordinary commercial potting soil with nothing else added and no fertilizer. Normally I would use a mixture of peat moss and home made compost, but I was in a hurry this year and didn’t have home made compost available.

It’s a normal tomato plant, just bred in a strange way, and in my opinion not very useful to home gardeners.

Sweetpea: Thanks for sharing your experiences!

This is a radical statement: “the roots did something strange to the dirt to make the water flow through quicker and not be well retained.” What would that be? Physical, chemical process?

Did you use same containers and soil with other tomato plants?