On 20/05/2013 09:06, wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:
I did try growing black tomatoes either last year or the year before.
They tasted roughly like wet cardboard and with a texture to match.

They were not quite black either - more dirty unappetising brown

I have found the same on both counts. Black cherry were the small
ones, which were mostly tasteless, and prone to splitting.

I am trying the last of my White Wonder seeds this year. But my
attempts to grow anything but tomatoey coloured tomatoes has met with
mostly disaster. We got some ok Cream Sausage tomatoes, but then the
plants came down with blight before anything else was even fruiting.

The yellow ones are quite fun for a novelty. Black was a bridge too far.
Maybe I was unlucky and they would taste OK in a sunnier year.

Yellow alpine strawberries are OK though a bit small and have the
distinct advantage that birds don't recognise them are ripe fruit.

I don't like alpine strawberries, but the white ones seem to be a lot
nicer than the red. The red ones taste gritty. The white ones were
a lot more palatable.

I wonder if they're good for jam. White strawberry jam may go down
well with the gardening club show (as a change from my aronia berry
and redcurrant)

I have to net soft fruit if I want to eat any of them. Raspberries are a
notable exception as the birds find the stems too flexible to land on.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

I've grown black chillies, specifically Czech Black. They aren't quite black, but a very nice shiny dark purple/green. However they ripen to red. Maybe in a warmer climate they would have more heat before they turn red. After all, you can buy very hot green chillies, but chillies I've grow (outdoors) in England have never been hot when green.

Martin Brown wrote:
The yellow ones are quite fun for a novelty. Black was a bridge too far.

I found most of hte yellow ones tasteless and squishy.

Maybe I was unlucky and they would taste OK in a sunnier year.

Not in my experience.

I have to net soft fruit if I want to eat any of them. Raspberries are a
notable exception as the birds find the stems too flexible to land on.

The only thing the birds (touch wood) tend to feast on are the redcurrants.
And only the early ones (we have 2 bushes, inheritted on the allotment, and
one fruits about a month or more earlier than the other. If it isn't netted
it is stripped bare very quickly)