Money Maker, Delicious and Italian Market Wonder

11 years ago

Already started buying seeds and looking into tomato varieties to grow next year. Three varieties I am considering are Money Maker, Delicious and Italian Market Wonder.

I have found all three at Gourmet Seed (gourmetseed.com). All sound really great in their descriptions.

Any advice or comments from anyone growing any of these? Thanks!

Featured Answer

carolyn137

11 years ago

Rita, I answered you elsewhere so you can cut and paste if you want to or wait and see what others say here and then I might feel like cutting and pasting

I think at the other site you said just Market Wonder, maybe mentioned Italian Market Wonder and I said I hadn't grown Market Wonder but as I watched some tennis I realized I had but with it's proper name of:

Merveille des Marches, which is an old French variety.

After doing a lot of Googling it turns out that someone put the name Italian in front of Market Wonder and the two are the same and if you read at various seed sites you'll also see that the blurbs/pictures are the same as well.

And where the Italian one is listed no history is given although the history of the French one is at several places.

Carolyn

Comments (8)

newyorkrita
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks, Carolyn.
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sautesmom Sacramento
11 years ago
Delicious is not. At all.
A horrible waste of a great name.

Carla in Sac
dickiefickle
11 years ago
I also am curious to other opinions of Delicious Tomato ,as my seedling for them died.
carolyn137
11 years ago
Here's my initial response to Rita as cut and pasted from elsewhere, and includes my opinion of the variety Delicious as well.

%%%%%%%

(Rita, I've grown:

Moneymaker and wouldn't grow it again. It's an English variety, that was bred in England for greenhouse growing many years ago and has that aggressive somewhat tart taste that almost all of the English like. There are other varieties, all English ones, that are about the same.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=les;&gs_nf=1&cp=12&gs_id...

I'd prefer to link to Tania's page but right now it seems down, so this general Google search will have to suffice.

Delicious, which I don't find to be delicious, is still the current world record holder for weight at at 7 # 12 oz, which I think is its main claim to fame. However, folks growing it without using the tricks that those who grow for competitions seldom get over a pound.

Market Wonder I've not grown. ( see correction in my above post here)

Just my opinion but I think there are many hundreds of large red beefsteak varieties I'd grow before I'd ever grow Delicious or ANY of the English varieties again.

Carolyn ( who deleted here something she wrote about trading seeds vs buying them since trading seeds had been discussed in the thread)
newyorkrita
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks Carla and Carolyn. Delicious is off the list of possibles and I will not be ordering it. The other two I am still considering.
grow4free
11 years ago
Moneymaker is very productive and will crank out lots of smaller tomatoes as well as some larger ones. It is also a very juicy tomato which turns some people off. It's not for everybody.
Mokinu
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
I grew Market Wonder this year. The plants are quite indeterminate and regular leaf. The fruit is red and medium-sized. It's has sort of a Brandywinish kind of flavor, I think (I could be wrong, since my Brandywine variety might not be Brandywine after all), but it's probably firmer and somewhat different. I liked it. The one other person here who tried it liked it. It wasn't heat-tolerant, except that one tomato set in the heat (I saved seeds from that one). The plants indoors were prone to edema and/or downy mildew, except a couple of them fared better than the rest (and those are the ones I transplanted. The plants are quite drought-tolerant, it seems. They grow vigorously even in poor, dry soil where Cherokee Purple, Gardener's Delight, and Kellogg's Breakfast hardly grew at all. (Note: Not all of our soil was like this soil. This was on a mound.) Even Market Wonder suffered in this soil, eventually, but at least it grew vigorously for a good while, and set more fruits than those others. My seed source was wintersown.org (fall, 2014). It may do well in containers, since it was one of the more successful tomatoes in a crowded raised bed.