Gary O’ Sena Tomato Reviews, Yield & Photos

Gary O’ Sena (USA). Bred by Keith Mueller and a great producer. Indeterminate, Potato Leaf (PL) foliage. The fruits are oblate beefsteaks, dark pinkish-purple, with absolutely outstanding flavor. For me, it’s consistently one of the earliest large slicers to ripen.

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.

Someone handed me these seeds at our first forum seed swap. I honestly thought it was a pepper variety at first, so I’m not even sure who to thank! Definitely going on my grow list.

Gary O’ Sena is hands down my favorite variety; it’s earned a permanent spot in my greenhouse. I’ll take some pics this season and get them uploaded.

Fruits run anywhere from 7 oz up to 1.3 lbs (200-600 g). The color is super interesting – a wine-red with lilac undertones, and a deep, rich dark red inside. Always productive for me. Back in 2016, we had a brutal, hot summer. Most of my plants only managed to set on the first and second clusters, and many varieties just completely dropped their blossoms further up, no matter how much I babied them. Not Gary! This guy powered right through and kept producing. Maybe not to its max potential, but it held onto its blossoms!

It’s a PL variety. My only real complaint is that it’s a space hog. The plant gets massive, which is an issue in my greenhouse. But for tomatoes this gorgeous, I’ll forgive it.

First time growing this one. I can’t really speak to earliness or yield because my plant got zapped by a late spring frost and took forever to bounce back from a stump 😞

But the color is beautiful, and the flavor is nice and sweet, especially considering how bad of a tomato year it was.

A quick follow-up on Gary. I decided to actually save some seed this year since a lot of folks wanted to swap for it… Well, I managed to get exactly four seeds out of an entire tomato! Turns out, the seeds in this variety are tiny – mostly just unviable slivers/duds – with very few plump, good seeds.

The flavor though… my whole family picks this one out of the bowl. None of them even made it into the canning jars this year because we ate them all fresh. The interior color is wild; it seriously looks like dark blood.

I grew this one this season specifically to restock my seeds and enjoy the flavor. My Gary O’ Sena actually threw Regular Leaf  foliage instead of Potato Leaf, so I was really curious to see what the fruit would look like.

They ripened to a brownish-burgundy, super sweet, early, and absolutely zero cracking when fully ripe. Didn’t drop blossoms either. Totally loved it 👍😋 I think I’ve finally found my perfect 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 it looks like it’s loaded with 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 I don’t know, maybe I’ve been growing an off-type all these years 🤷‍♀️ But mine never had that many seeds. I just never really paid attention before and didn’t realize how few fully developed ones there were.

My original seeds came from Popenko [Editor’s note: a popular Russian heirloom seed vendor], and my fruit always comes out perfectly shaped. No heavy ribbing or fluting like you see on Lorraine Beauty. If it was ribbed, I would have tossed the seeds by now-I’m just not a fan of ribbed tomatoes, personal preference 🙂.

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

Here’s what happened to me: Got my seeds in a forum swap (thanks again ladies! 🌺). Since I was trialing a bunch of new varieties, I only planted 3 of each. Well, out of my 3 Gary O’ Senas, 2 were PL and 1 was RL.

While they were growing, I figured maybe a stray seed got mixed in during processing. But when they ripened, I realized it was definitely genetic segregation. The fruit on both types was practically identical in shape and flavor 👍. There was a slight difference in size and skin color though: the PL fruit was darker and a bit smaller, while the RL plant pumped out tomatoes that were about 1.5x bigger with more of a red skin, even though the interior was still clearly a dark tomato.

Thanks Nadezhda, good to know!

I pulled my first ripe ones on July 4th. PL plant, beautiful burgundy-brown skin, and great flavor. It did suffer from some blossom drop in the mid-summer heat, only leaving 1-2 tomatoes per cluster, but it kept setting fruit right up until the fall. The one on the scale was the very first to ripen, so it’s a bit on the smaller side.

Oh man, I totally fell in love with this one! Big, vigorous PL plants, loaded clusters all the way up the vine, massive fruit top to bottom, and zero cracking. I just weighed one I saved for seed -over 1 lbs (500 g)! Deep wine color, sweet flavor, and almost completely solid meat. A forever favorite for me!

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 of mine were huge, with 4, 5, sometimes 6 fruits per cluster. It was a great producer, though flavor-wise it turned out just a little mild for my taste. Still, it’s DEFINITELY getting a permanent spot in the garden. Give it another shot! (I grew them outside, no pruning. For Western Siberia, that’s a SUPER RESULT!)

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

Grew it in the greenhouse in 2019. A massive, powerful vine, absolutely loaded with uniform, blemish-free tomatoes.

Flavor-wise, it was the best tasting dark tomato of my 2019 season! Extremely sweet!

Seeds came from Lena @rosvo.

Our family also fell for this big, dense, delicious Gary. And for good reason. First, it’s huge (who doesn’t love a giant tomato?), second, it’s meaty and tastes amazing 😉, and third, it was a brand new variety for us.

Really happy with it. Grown outdoors in Khabarovsk, summer 2022.

Afternoon everyone. I ran this one in 2022. Despite a blistering hot summer here in the Minsk region, it pumped out massive beefsteaks on the lower clusters and all the way up the vine. It takes a lot to surprise me, but I was shocked.

I pruned it to two main stems. On both leaders, the bottom two clusters had 3-5 fruits each, and they were giants! One of the stems actually started buckling under the weight, I had to do some emergency tying. The fruits are meaty and delicious. If I didn’t have such a huge backlog of seeds to test out, I would have definitely planted it again in 2023, but greenhouse space is tight. Without a doubt, a top favorite!

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

I just let it go crazy and bush out to about 6 stems, so it acts almost like a semi-determinate, capping out around 3.5 ft (1 m) tall.

I have a feeling my Gary O’ Sena might be a cross/off-type, but that doesn’t make it any less tasty, whether it’s for fresh eating or canning.

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