Quick Summary of Afternoon Delight
- 🌍 Origin: A stunning creation by renowned American breeder Brad Gates (Wild Boar Farms). This variety is incredibly popular among Eastern European and Russian collectors for its beauty, reliability, and taste.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, vigorous, and tall. Plants easily reach 1.8–2 meters (6–6.5 feet) or more. The bushes are powerful and heavy-yielding, requiring sturdy stakes and well-supported trusses to prevent snapping.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, oblate beefsteaks weighing between 200–600g (7–21 oz), with megablooms capable of producing fruits up to 750g (26.5 oz). They are visually striking bicolors (yellow/orange with red/crimson marbling) topped with dark purple anthocyanin shoulders. The flesh is dense, meaty, and very juicy.
- 👅 Flavor: Rich, complex, and sweet with a refreshing fruity tartness. Some growers note a unique flavor profile reminiscent of kiwi, complemented by the distinct aroma typical of anthocyanin varieties.
- ⏳ Growing Conditions: Mid-to-late season. It performs exceptionally well in both greenhouses and open ground, showing great resilience even in cold, wet spring weather. It also ripens beautifully off the vine without losing its flavor.
A Brad Gates variety. Basically, the description could end right here 🙂 because for me personally, this breeder’s authorship is practically a guarantee that the tomato will be delicious and beautiful.
In the greenhouse, it was tall (2 meters / 6.5 feet), mid-late ripening. The fruits are very beautiful, large, yellow-red (bicolor), with a purple spot near the stem, oblate in shape. Sweet taste, juicy and meaty, with a fruity tartness.
I got very little dark coloration because it grew in the greenhouse, covered with shade cloth against the sun. It was 1.7 meters (5.5 ft) tall. The 1st and 2nd trusses ripened in the twenties of July. The taste is sweet, with a fruity aftertaste. I liked the variety.
A very beautiful variety. I grew 1 bush outdoors in open ground. The yield was excellent. Indeterminate, 1.5m+ (5ft+). Mid-season ripening. The fruits are very large, orange with crimson strokes and purple shoulders (good antho expression). For my taste, one of the best tomatoes with anthocyanin. The flesh is dense, juicy, bicolored without overpowering sweetness, but the flavor is rich and very well balanced. Fruits ranged from 300 to 600g (10.5–21 oz). There were no small fruits in the trusses.
I grew it this year. The fruits were large at the beginning of the season, and a bit smaller towards the end, but they were all delicious.
I really liked the variety; the fruits are beautiful and the flavor is rich with a fruity tint. The walls are quite thick—they hold their shape well—but they are also juicy. I couldn’t evaluate the true yield potential because the weather in August let us down, and none of my varieties could show their full potential in my garden.
Photos from October 18, October 5, and September 14:
My Afternoon Delight turned out like this. These are tomatoes from the lower truss; the ones higher up are a bit smaller and still ripening. Not much red coloration; in my conditions, it turned out yellowish-orange with dark strokes. It started to ripen around the twenties of July, growing right opposite the door in the greenhouse (on the end bed).
It’s a rather tall and powerful bush, and I think tying up the trusses is absolutely mandatory (without support, my trusses were trying to snap). And well, I messed up the watering, so it cracked. It’s delicious, juicy, and meaty—my husband calls these “beef for vegetarians”.
This tomato has also started to ripen for me. Unfortunately, I only have one bush. I’m almost afraid to pick it. It’s beautiful, but eating something like this is unusual for me.
I tried it today. The skin is a bit tough. It tastes like kiwi, with a tartness just like a kiwi. Honestly, if you close your eyes and taste it, you’d say it’s kiwi! 😂
Afternoon Delight. The most beautiful variety, very tasty! Grew in the greenhouse on 2 stems. In May, it wanted to die from the cold and endless rain, but then it changed its mind, recovered, and yielded decently. In this problematic year, all the blue (anthocyanin) varieties proved themselves champions; not a single one failed!
The largest one, grown from a megabloom (fused blossom), weighed in at 750g (26.5 oz).
I grew 1 bush of Afternoon Delight this year. Unusually beautiful fruits, looking more like exotic fruit than tomatoes. Mine reached 1.8m+ (6ft+), pruned to 2 stems. It began to ripen in early August. In terms of taste, for me personally, it had everything—both sweetness and tartness, and that unique aroma inherent only to varieties with anthocyanin.
And the yield didn’t disappoint: I picked 24 fruits weighing 200-300g (7-10.5 oz) from one bush, plus some smaller ones I didn’t even count. At home, I placed the fruits of this specific variety on a dish, and everyone just admired them; it was almost a pity to cut them up for a salad.
(I tried to post a photo but the link didn’t work. I will try again in the next post.)
Here it is, let’s try again.
Excellent tomato! Beautiful and tasty. It’s nice that the bush is so powerful. It is a pleasure to deal with such a variety.
Thank you Olya (@olyamit) for the seeds!
The seeds of this variety were purchased from Myazina. I grew this wonderful tomato on my plot in 2022. The bush grew in the greenhouse, and I only had one plant. I really liked the tomato both for its taste and its appearance.
It’s a delicious orange-pink bicolor with a purple blush/marbling. The taste is sweet with fruity notes. The fruits are large, oblate, with slight ribbing. It allows for ripening off the vine indoors. For me, the taste of such fruits was simply amazing. I can’t leave all the fruits to ripen fully on the bush because it slows down the ripening of the rest of the crop, and transporting firm, slightly underripe fruits from the dacha (summer house) without damage is much easier.
If you have the opportunity to get these seeds, be sure to plant them—the tomatoes are tasty, beautiful, and highly productive.
Found a photo of a sliced one.
