You must Grow These 2 Epic Cherry Tomatoes!

You're telling me you haven't grown these two incredible cherry tomatoes? Well then, it's a great thing you stumbled across this video. It's really exciting in the garden right now. The cherry tomatoes are finally starting to ripen up and today I'm going to be harvesting the two varieties I'm growing this year and explaining why they are so amazing and you need to be growing them next season. This is my row of double stem cherry tomatoes and unfortunately we're having problems with squirrels. So the squirrels are coming out here and they're just plucking off the cherry tomatoes, even climbing up the plants. I see some of the ones, you know, two, three feet up the plant even are getting stripped off by those little devils. So first of all I put out two little bowls of water that the squirrels could drink out of because apparently oftentimes they just get thirsty. That didn't work. Another action I took was to put little Christmas tree ornaments on the plants as decoys. The idea is that the squirrels bite into this thinking it's a tomato and realize, Oh, I can't eat that. And then they leave. Again, did not work. I also sprinkled ground hot cayenne peppers around the perimeter of my garden. No luck with that method either. Finally my mom took it upon herself to put this little guy in the garden. Seems to be working so far, but I'm not going to hold my breath with this one. I know that squirrels aren't why you're here, but I just wanted to provide a bit of backstory so you know what's going on in the garden. First of all, just look how incredible these plants look. Looking pretty nice. Got a lot of ripening fruits on here and you can see we've just got clusters all the way up the vines as they grow. Look at these cherries. Beautiful. And I'm going to try to keep the calyx intact. So that was the large red cherry tomato. I grew these plants back in 2015 in my front yard garden here and I didn't prune them at all. I just kind of let them go ham and they did really well. They produced boatloads of these beautiful large red cherries. Of course, got to get that trusty kitchen knife out for a nice clean slice. I'm going to take off the calyx first and I am going to just slice it in half like a, like a chef would. Gordon Ramsey would be proud. So you can see it's a pretty meaty tomato, not much gel in there. And let's give it a shot. Yeah, not too bad. Not too great either. Just a standard cherry tomato. It's not like a sun gold or something else that has a really nice citrusy or tangy flavor. It's very standard, very basic, but great for a salad or something like a bruschetta. So overall I'm fairly impressed with the large red cherry. It's performed pretty well. It's an heirloom variety. For an heirloom, it's pretty vigorous and so far pretty disease resistant. And so I think, you know, if you want to save your own seeds, this is a great option to do that. The trusses aren't as long and don't put out quite as much fruit as say a sweet million or super sweet 100 cherry tomato, but they make up for that with their size. As I said, they're a little larger than your standard red cherry. I realize I'm still holding a sharp knife and probably freaking some of you out. This is a family friendly channel for the most part. And so I will put this knife down right now. Cherry number two, I can't believe you're not growing is the chocolate cherry tomato. In the past I grew a variety called the black cherry, which is actually very similar in nature. And this is another heirloom tomato that ripens to a nice chocolatey brown color. I do notice that these cherry tomatoes are a little larger as well. And I'm really excited to share with you that we do have some ripe ones on the vines. So time for yet another taste test from your boy Lucas. Let's go. So you can see this cherry tomato has a lot more seeds and gel on the inside than does the red cherry. This one's definitely way better than the larger cherry in terms of flavor. It's not super sweet. Again, not like the sun gold, but it has kind of a hint of smokiness to it. As a lot of people describe the purple and the brown type tomatoes. I'll tell you tomatoes are great, but when you're really hungry, they just don't satiate your hunger. So again, guys, the chocolate cherry is a big winner in my books. Not only are the plants extremely vigorous like the larger cherry, but these fruits are delicious. Tastes like an heirloom, like an heirloom should with that beautiful complexity of flavor that you're looking for. And one thing I noticed about the plants is that their leaves are this beautiful shiny green, a lot shinier than your average tomato plant, which I found to be a common trait among these brown cherry tomato plants. And for me, growing tomatoes isn't just about, uh, the food source. To me, tomato gardening and just vegetable gardening in general is an art form. The garden is my canvas and I paint it with plants. So if you want to grow some beautiful plants, check out the black cherry tomato, the large red cherry. They're both great varieties that I recommend. I'd be really intrigued to know what varieties of cherry tomatoes you're growing and which ones do you recommend? Because there are so many out there. And as you can see, I have a pretty small garden here and it's really hard to try all the different varieties. But if I could get some recommendations from you growers, that'd be great too. I'd really love to hear it. And if you're new to growing cherry tomatoes or you've been growing for years, I encourage you to check out some of my other videos. I have one specifically on how to grow cherry tomatoes. I have a bunch of tomato growing videos in my tomato growing playlist. Also follow me on Instagram at Lucas Grows Best and check out some of those links in the description for some useful garden products. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. It's been really exciting to grow the cherries this year and I hope your gardening season has been going as well as mine, aside from the squirrels, which I mentioned at the start of this video. Thanks for watching. Seriously, I couldn't do this without you guys. Hope you have a great day and try these two varieties. They're awesome. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.