Black Opal is a direct descendant of ‘Black Cherry’ with a rich, complex, sweet-yet-tangy flavour. It was trialled by the RHS back in 2017 and supposedly missed out on an AGM because it was just a little too large for a cherry tomato and a little too small for a salad one! That matters not. The flavour is fabulous, it’s prolific and can give you more than a hundred tomatoes per plant, with good general disease resistance and late blight tolerance too. This is now one of my ‘must grow’ choices. Indeterminate
Sow: we start about 6-8 weeks before our last frost is expected, sowing 5mm deep into modules. Keep under cover or on a warm windowsill. Transplant to pots when large enough to handle and grow on until ready to harden off and plant after frost danger has passed.
Grow: plant in the greenhouse or in a sunny sheltered part of your garden. For the best flavour keep soil evenly damp and try not to over-water or overfeed. Black Opal is indeterminate, it will bloom, set new fruit and ripen fruit all at the same time until the first frosts.
Enjoy: the deep, glossy brown-red and dark chocolate appearance of the fruits is the first hint that they are something special. Once I ate my first one I fell in love with their sweetness which isn’t cloying as they have a tang there too.
💡 Did you know?
Tomato sweetness can be measured using the Brix scale. Fresh tomatoes are often somewhere around 3.5–5.5°Bx, while Black Opal can reach around 9°Bx. That helps explain why those little dark fruits taste so wonderfully sweet.
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