Quick Summary of Sweet Cream
- 🌍 Origin: An artisan elongated cherry/plum variety, closely related in genetics and appearance to famous varieties like Blush and Candy Sweet Icicle.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. In a greenhouse, it typically reaches 1.5 to 2 meters (5 to 6.5 ft) and can be pruned to multiple stems. The plant has a delicate “wispy” or finely cut leaf structure. Note: It is prone to physiological leaf roll early in the season due to stress, but it quickly recovers.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Elongated plum or bullet-shaped fruits with a distinct pointed tip (beak), weighing around 40–50g (1.4–1.8 oz). The skin is incredibly glossy, with growers describing it as almost pearlescent or glittering. They start cream-colored with green stripes and ripen to a rich golden-yellow with brilliant red streaks.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Intensely sweet with a concentrated, rich flavor (slightly more acidic and complex than Candy Sweet Icicle). They hold their shape well and have a decent shelf life.
- 💡 Pro Tips: Do not pick them too early! To unlock their full sugary potential, wait until the fruit softens slightly to the touch and the red stripes fully emerge.
Sweet Cream. Indeterminate, medium-tall, can be pruned to multiple stems. The tomatoes are plum-shaped with a sharp pointed tip (beak), weighing up to 50g (1.8 oz). At the mature green stage, they are cream-colored with green stripes; when fully ripe, they turn golden with red stripes and streaks. They are sweet, firm, and store pretty well for a certain period of time. Seeds were from Mokushka.
For the absolute best taste, it is mandatory to wait for full ripening—when the fruit softens a bit and the red stripes clearly appear. It is very similar to the super-popular cherry variety Blush.
Sweet Cream started ripening in the greenhouse as one of the very first. The trusses had 6-8 sweet little plums weighing about 40-50g (1.4-1.8 oz) each, and the taste was excellent. It grew well over 2 meters (6.5 ft) for me and ended up bending under the roof of the greenhouse.
For some reason, at the beginning of the summer, it suffered from severe physiological leaf roll. I fussed and babied it for a while, thinking I wouldn’t even see any fruit, but it eventually returned to normal and delivered a great harvest—definitely around 3 kg (6.6 lbs) per bush. And it’s so handsome!
We harvested the final crop the day before yesterday. I cut off all the remaining trusses—both the ripe ones and the green ones for counter-ripening indoors—they will go into canning jars. There’s no point in waiting for warmth here in Siberia anymore.
I planted it in 2019, seeds from Lena Danko, grew it outdoors in open ground. The seedling broke during transplanting, so I had to re-root a cutting from the top. Because of that, it ended up being quite short, much lower than the 1.2-1.5m (4-5 ft) Candy Sweet Icicle plants next to it, and naturally, the yield wasn’t anything spectacular that year compared to the others. And this year, the seeds flat out refused to germinate.
But I got enough fruits in 2019 to taste and admire it. Here, with our intense sun, it turns out incredibly bright and beautiful. The skin literally looks like it was dusted with edible pearlescent glitter—it shines so much! It’s a very glittering cherry tomato. By the way, the photo was intentionally taken outside in natural daylight/partial shade; under electric lighting, the color is even more saturated.
The flavor is also vibrant. It is very sweet, just like Candy Sweet Icicle, but with a little more acidity, making the taste feel much more concentrated. The bush itself has a delicate, wispy constitution, just like Candy Sweet Icicle, to which it is a close relative. The green cherry in the photo is the Grinch variety.
Svetlana said:
Sweet Cream. Indeterminate, medium-tall, can be pruned to multiple stems.
Svetlana, could you please tell me what leaf type it has? Out of my 4 seedlings, one has a completely regular leaf (RL), and the rest have finely cut, wispy foliage just like Blush. Now I’m wondering if it actually is Blush… How do they even differ?
Also, what do you mean by “medium-tall”? I was promised it would only be 50-60 cm (20-24 inches) outdoors.
Anna said:
Out of my 4 seedlings, one has a completely regular leaf (RL), and the rest have finely cut, wispy foliage just like Blush… How do they even differ?
It also seemed to me like a brother to Blush—the bush is the exact same type and so are the fruits, they differ only in very minor details, the shape is slightly different. The foliage is definitely finely cut/wispy, if I remember correctly. In the greenhouse, it grew as an indeterminate to about 1.5m (5 ft), pruned to multiple stems.
