Dobies of Devon; ” over 30 years of quality plants by post” although from their website I learnt their orgins lie in Chester, going back to the 188os and that there may have once been a Samuel Dobie plus son. In the small print there’s also a note that Dobies are a division of Suttons Consumer Products. (Which would explain the presence of some old grafted friends.) Nice, bright catalogue, lots of veg, fruit and flowers but in that larger floppy format I don’t like quite as much as the dinky A5 ones but that’s just personal pickiness. Straightforward choices; again the tomato pages sing to the tune of red…Postage for seeds is 95 pence and plants are £3.95 delivery charge.
So what are the tomato temptations ? Organised by size, into 4 categories: Small Fruited, Small Fruited for baskets or container growing, Medium Fruited and the Large Fruited – 24 seed varieties to choose from and 7 plant varieties. A seed in bold means that variety is also avaliable as a plant – and for plants there’s a choice of delivery dates; mid April or May.
Small Fruited Seed:
- Apero/ Cherry Belle/ Gardeners Delight/ Golden Peardrop/ Red Alert/ Sultana/ Sungold/ Sweetbaby
Small Fruited for baskets or container growing:
- Hundreds & Thousands/ Maskotka/ Tumbler F1/ Tumbling Tom Red/ Tumbling Tom Yellow
Medium Fruited Varieties:
- Ailsa Craig/ Alicante/ Cossack F1/ Fantasio F1/ Golden Sunrise/ Moneymaker/ Romana F1
Large Fruited Varieties:
- Corazon/ Country Taste F1/ Faworyt/ Incas F1 plus as a plant only Beefeater F1
Grafted Plants
And then some old friends which explain the link to Suttons. Grafted onto “Maxifort” rootstock a choice of :
- Belriccio/ Elegance/ Conchito/ Dasher/ Santorage/ and new for this year – YellowSun.
And something which is making my fingers itch to press the order button – a Tomato Twin – one plant/ two grafts – Dasher and Santorage. (Dasher being the one I accidentally didn’t get last year). So I think the idea is you get 2 cordons per plant – each being of a different variety. May be it’s the reindeer name wot’s doing it – but I have the feeling ordering this item, in terms of horticultural taste, is the equivalent of ordering a Singin’ Santa in Sunglasses as a Christmas centrepiece. But I’ve a feeling this two-branched tomato tree might just be a present to myself regardless !
Apart from the engineered novelties – what else caught my eye:
- Corazon is new for this year. Described as a “new hybrid of a traditional oxheart ( cuor di bue) type – it looks very attractive. The fruit in the photo is a large, ribbed pear shape.
- Fantasio F1 – is listed as having good blight tolerance to help leaves stay green and healthy – with photo of said healthy leaves next to sad, blight affected ones.
- Apero is listed as “probably the finest tasting cherry variety avaliable ( and a top-seller in supermarkets)”.
So just excuse me whilst I go and shut Santa up so I can concentrate on getting my order in…..
