I grew Chocolate Cherry and Black Cherry side by side last year so I could compare them. Chocolate Cherry produced plenty of fruit and the fruit was slightly larger than Black Cherry but I thought the flavor was poor. It was so poor by comparison to Black Cherry that I stopped picking the fruit from the Chocolate Cherry plants and left them for the birds to eat. I won't waste space on Chocolate Cherry again. Since the perception of flavor is highly individual, though, you won't know if your taste buds like the flavor of CC until you try it for yourself. Our taste buds are as individual as we human beings are so no two people will necessarily perceive the flavor of the same fruit in the same way. Black Plum is a really unique paste tomato. It is very small for a paste tomato, so it is a lot of work to pick and process compared to larger paste varieties. I would have to pick and process 10-15 Black Plums to give me the equivalent of 1 Speckled Roman paste tomato, and I grew them both last year just a few feet from one another so it was a fair comparison. I wouldn't compare the fruit from one plant one year to the fruit from a different plant in another year, but when you grow them in the garden in the same year, that's a pretty fair comparison. I love Black Plum. It has a unique flavor I haven't found in any other tomato, but because they are such a PITA to process, I usually eat them fresh. Sometimes if I have just a few, I'll run them through the tomato strainer with a bunch of bigger tomatoes and cook them down into sauce or salsa together. I'd never get enough Black Plums at one time to make a batch of sauce only from Black Plum, for example. Haley's Purple Comet was okay the year I grew up but didn't produce very well (it was a very hot, dry year). I didn't like it enough to grow it again. I don't think it cares much for our hot weather because it stopped producing very early in the season, long before other varieties were shut down by the heat. I haven't grown Honkin' Big Black Cherry so cannot comment on it except to say this. You or I or anyone can take any open-pollinated tomato and rename it and sell it and no one can stop us, so when someone offers a 'new' version of a well-loved OP, I usually am not quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes people who grow the 'new' version don't really think it is different from the old one, if you know what I mean. I've linked the Tatiana's Tomato Base page for this variety below so you can see what people say about it. TTB is usually the place I go to check on a variety that is new to me to see what I can learn about it. She does a great job of keeping track of what's what and who, if anyone, is selling the variety commercially. Some plants that are "rare" are only rare because somebody renamed a common variety....and I am not saying or implying that the folks who named the Honkin' variety did that...I'm just saying such things are common occurrences in the seed world. You cannot automatically discount a new variety though because tomatoes cross all the time or mutate or throw off sports and any one of them has the potential to be great. For outstanding paste tomato varieties, I am assuming that you want the name of some that are available as transplants? That really restricts the list because a lot of the best ones you will pretty much have to grow yourself from seed if you want them. The best one you're likely to find available as transplants is San Marzano, and if you find San Marzano Redorta, it is even better. Both are very good to excellent. Speckled Roman is a terrific one and sometimes can be found as transplants. I've grown Heidi for quite a few years here. It performs exceptionally well in our climate, perhaps because it was brought here to the USA by someone from a similarly hot summer climate. The flavor is excellent and the plants produce very heavily, often with pretty much more fruit than foliage on the plants. I don't know if anyone sells Heidi transplants commercially. The standard paste type you'll see everywhere is Roma VF or some version of Roma. Before I started raising my plants from seed, I used to buy Viva Italia and really liked it, but I rarely see it in stores as transplants although I think the seed is still available. Rutgers is an old standby--a multipurpose tomato that has great disease tolerance, produces well and is about as good for fresh eating as it is for canning. I don't like its flavor as much as that of San Marzano or San Marzano Redorta, but it isn't bad. Most tomato maniacs who can a lot of tomatoes grow a mixture of tomatoes and combine them in batches. When I am making salsa, I don't really care what sort of paste tomatoes I use because the tomatoes are really just the base flavor and the stronger flavor of the peppers, onions and spices predominate in the finished salsa product. For pasta sauces or for plain canned sauce or whole tomatoes, most people I know blend together a variety of tomatoes, both paste and regular, to get a nice blend of flavors. You will have to cook down the sauce a little more if you use non-paste types, but the flavor is so superb it is worth it. The best-flavored sauces I make usually contain a blend of several varieties, and often includes black, purple and pink types. A sauce cooked only from SunGold tomatoes is about as good as it gets. If you are wanting to dry paste tomatoes to use as sun-dried tomatoes, you cannot go wrong with Principe Borghese', except they are really small and it takes a long time to pick the fruit from even one plant because the plants produce so many fruit. As much as I like PB, I grew a lot of paste tomatoes this year that produce larger fruit in order to cut down on the time I spend harvesting and slicing tomatoes to dry. Shiavone Italian Paste was superb last year along with Speckled Roman. This year I am trying a bunch of new ones like Russo Sicilian Togeta, Carol Chyko's Big Black Paste and Tony's Italian, but cannot comment on them yet other than to say the seeds germinated and the plants are growing just fine. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Honkin' Big Black Cherry

Hi Mister-al I tried to email you, but I keep getting a failure notice so I will try again another day, I can sure use a few seeds, I have a yellow one, but the peppers are about the same size of a large grape. My address ia georgew 7911 at Yahoo dot Com I printed the whole thing out so spammers can't get it as a lot of this is printed over the internet where anyone might see it. George

"Oh ya, all the stores still have plenty here. Seedling purchase won't be issue. Was more curious if was better variety to go for, vs maybe ones that would take too long." If you are buying transplants rather than growing your own from seed then your choices will be severely limited anyway. Do you have a list of what is available? If so then you can look each up by name to see what its DTM is and look for one around 60-70 days, no longer. Otherwise we could list all sorts of varieties of the thousands that fall into that maturity range but the odds are very slim you could find them as a nursery transplant. Nurseries and the big box stores tend to limit themselves to 20-30 varieties only. Dave

This one is a small flowered cross of Daddy's Heart X Serenade of Springtime. I wish the sepals would behave on Remembered Kisses X Empire of Dawn and Dusk. This is Remembered Kisses X Phillies Starter. It's going to be really difficult to choose which red/white ones to keep. That's all for today. Nancy