Quick Summary of Amber Keyes
- 🌍 Origin: A fantastic multiflora cherry tomato from breeder Michael Keyes (part of the famous Keyes multiflora series).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, regular leaf. When grown outdoors in open ground, it tends to stay relatively compact, reaching about 1 meter (3.3 ft). It is incredibly resilient, showing excellent resistance to harsh weather and late blight.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small, yellow-green pear or teardrop-shaped cherries with green shoulders, weighing about 15–20g (0.5–0.7 oz). They often feature a tiny, sharp beak at the blossom end. Note: The fruits are prone to shattering (dropping from the vine easily) even before fully ripe, so harvesting requires a gentle touch.
- 👅 Flavor: A nice, complex flavor profile. It is moderately sweet with a distinct, piquant tart note.
- ⏳ Yield & Storage: Produces massive, fan-shaped multiflora trusses. The first few trusses are usually spectacular. The fruits store very well at room temperature for about two weeks before they begin to shrivel.
A yellow-green cherry tomato with a multiflora truss from Michael Keyes’ series.
Indeterminate with regular foliage. Outdoors in the open ground, it didn’t grow very tall, about 1 meter (3.3 ft). The trusses are multiflora type. The first two trusses bloomed luxuriously, but further up, without extra care/feeding, they get smaller. (In the photo, Geranium Kiss is in the background.) p.s. photo lost on some old hosting site, sorry guys.
The fruit is a little yellow pear with green shoulders, not large, weighing about 15-20g (0.5-0.7 oz). Apparently, some shape segregation is still possible, as you can see photos of these tomatoes ranging from teardrops to club-shaped with a long thin “neck”. They usually have a small, sharp little beak (nipple) at the blossom end. (In the photo alongside Blue Keyes).
It sets fruit quite well, despite being a multiflora.
There is one quirk—the tomato is poorly attached to the branch and is highly prone to dropping (shattering), and not only when fully ripe. Because of this, harvesting is inconvenient. By the time you gently squeeze all the more-or-less yellow ones to check for ripeness, a portion of them will fall off.
Taste-wise, it wasn’t the sweetest cherry this year, just average in sweetness. There is a piquant, tart note present.
It stores for about two weeks without a fridge, then starts to shrivel.
Cherry Amber Keyes (in some local translated catalogs it is literally and mistakenly listed as “Amber Piano Keys”).
It grew outdoors in the open ground, and honorably withstood summer attacks of late blight, a broken stem, and pouring rains. It set several large, fan-shaped multiflora trusses. I pruned it to 2 stems and topped it at a height of 1 meter (3.3 ft) so that the trusses would have time to ripen before the frost. A beautiful and quite tasty variety.
