Gary O’ Sena Tomato Reviews, Yield & Photos

Gary O’ Sena (USA). A high-yielding variety bred by Keith Mueller. Indeterminate. Potato leaf (PL) foliage. The fruits are oblate/boat-shaped, dark pink-purple, with excellent taste. It is the earliest of the large-fruited tomatoes.

It didn’t turn out to be high-yielding for me… The taste is good, weight is around 8.8-14 oz (250-400 g). Grew it in the greenhouse.

They gave me these seeds at the first forum meet-up, I honestly thought it was a pepper, and I don’t even know who to thank. I’ll definitely be growing it!

Gary O’ Sena is my absolute favorite variety; it has earned a permanent spot in my greenhouse forever. I’ll take some photos this season and upload them.

The tomatoes are from 7 oz to 1.3 lbs (200-600 g). The color is very interesting—wine-red with hints of lilac, and deep, rich dark red inside. It is always productive. During the 2016 season, we had a very difficult, hot summer. Only the first and second trusses survived on most plants, and many varieties simply dropped the blossoms on their third and fourth trusses no matter how much I babysat them—but not Gary O’ Sena! This handsome guy pushed through and produced. Granted, not everything it was capable of, but it didn’t drop its blossoms!

It’s a potato leaf (PL) variety. My only issue with it is that it takes up a lot of space; the bush is huge, which is a real concern in my greenhouses. But for such gorgeous tomatoes, I can forgive it.

Planted this variety for the first time. I can’t say much about earliness and yield because the plant got hit by a spring frost and took a long time to recover from a stump 😞

But the fruits have a very beautiful color, and the taste is pleasant and sweet, despite the bad year.

A little more about Gary O’ Sena. I decided to make the effort to save my own seeds this year, mostly because people wanted to trade for them… Well, I only got four seeds out of a whole tomato! It turns out the seeds in this variety are very, very small—mostly just undeveloped flecks—and there are very few plump, viable seeds.

But the flavor… all my relatives single this one out, and it didn’t even make it to the canning jars this year—we ate them all fresh. The flesh color inside is so unusual, it truly looks like the color of blood.

I grew this tomato this season to stock up on seeds and enjoy the taste. My Gary O’ Sena turned out to be a regular leaf (RL), NOT a potato leaf (PL), so I was very curious about what would grow from it.

The tomatoes grew to be brown-burgundy, very sweet, didn’t crack when fully ripe, were early, and didn’t drop blossoms. I absolutely loved it 👍😋 I’ve finally found the best dark tomato!

Lana_Sadovnica wrote:
Well, I only got four seeds out of a whole tomato! It turns out the seeds in this variety are very, very small—mostly just undeveloped flecks—and there are very few plump, viable seeds.

Wow, but in the photo there are tons of seeds 😲

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been growing an off-type for years 🤷‍♀️ But mine never had that many seeds. I just never bothered paying attention and didn’t realize there were so few fully developed ones.

My seeds originally came from Popenko [Editor’s note: a popular Russian heirloom seed vendor], and my tomatoes of this variety are always practically perfectly shaped. There are absolutely no wrinkled or ribbed ones like Lorraine Beauty. If there were, I would have tossed the variety—I don’t like ribbed tomatoes, just a matter of taste 🙂.

Olga wrote:
My Gary O’ Sena turned out to be a regular leaf (RL), NOT a potato leaf (PL)…

Here is what happened to me: I received seeds from the ladies on the forum (thanks again 🌺). Since I had a lot of new varieties, I planted a maximum of 3 plants per variety. Well, out of 3 Gary O’ Sena plants, 2 were Potato Leaf (PL) and 1 was Regular Leaf (RL).

During the growing stage, I thought maybe a stray seed from another variety slipped in during seed saving. But when they ripened, I leaned more toward the opinion that genetic segregation occurred, because the tomatoes were very similar in both shape and taste 👍. However, the color and size differed slightly: the PL ones were darker and a bit smaller, while the RL plant produced fruit about 1.5 times larger with more red on the outside, though the inside was clearly a dark tomato.

Thanks Nadezhda, good to know!

I picked the first ripe ones on July 4th. The bush had potato (PL) leaves, the fruit color is burgundy-brown, and the taste is very good. Mid-summer it suffered from blossom drop, leaving only 1-2 tomatoes per truss, but it continued setting fruit all the way until autumn. The one on the scale is the very first, slightly smaller tomato.

Oh! I fell in love with this variety! Beautiful, strong plants with potato leaves, full trusses on every tier, large fruits from the bottom to the top, and no cracking. I weighed a tomato today that I saved for seeds—over 1.1 lbs (500 g)! The color is dark wine, the flavor is sweet, and it’s practically solid meat! It’s a favorite forever!

Ladies, how many fruits do you get per truss? My Gary produces complex trusses with about a dozen buds forming on them.

There’s no way to get large fruits like that unless you thin the trusses and leave only about three per cluster.

grawicapa wrote:
There’s no way to get large fruits like that unless you thin the trusses and leave only about three per cluster.

All my fruits are very large, with 4-5-6 fruits per truss. This variety really pleased me, but it turned out to be a bit bland. Still, I am DEFINITELY giving it a permanent spot. Give it another chance. (I didn’t prune the plants, grew them outdoors. For Western Siberia—a SUPER RESULT!)

Grew it in 2019. The variety is highly productive and tasty.

Grew it in 2019 in the greenhouse. A tall, powerful bush, completely loaded with uniform, perfectly shaped tomatoes.

Flavor-wise—it was the tastiest dark tomato of 2019! Very sweet!

Seeds were from Lena @rosvo.

Our family also fell in love with this plump, firm, and delicious Gary. And rightly so. First, it’s huge (who would turn down a huge tomato?), second, it’s meaty and delicious 😉, and third, it was a new variety for us.

It really made us happy. This was grown outdoors in Khabarovsk during the summer of 2022.

Tomato Gary’O’Sena.

Good afternoon. I grew this variety in 2022. Despite a very hot summer here in the Minsk region, it set huge beefsteaks on the lower trusses and all the way up. It takes a lot to surprise me, but I was in shock.

I pruned it to two main stems. On each stem, the bottom two trusses had 3-5 fruits each, and they were massive! As a result, one of the stems actually started to snap under the weight. I had to urgently tie them together. The fruits are delicious and meaty. If it weren’t for my backlog of seeds and new varieties I need to test, I would have definitely planted it again in 2023, but sadly, space is limited. But without a doubt, it’s a favorite.

Gary finished strong as always: 14.5 lbs (6.6 kg) across 60 fruits.

I let it bush out thoroughly, running it to about 6 stems, so it grows more like a determinate, staying around 3.3 ft (1 m) tall.

I suspect my Gary O’ Sena might be an off-type, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious, whether eaten fresh or pickled.

Got the seeds back in ’16 from Lyuda @Lyudasik, and I grow it almost every year.