A British gardener smashed his own record growing the most tomatoes on a single stem

A British gardener bore the fruits of his labour when he broke a world record and grew 1,269 cherry tomatoes on a single stem.

In fact, Guinness World Records declared last week that Douglas Smith of Hertfordshire, England, smashed his own record for most tomatoes grown on a single stem, just a few weeks after he set it at 839.

"I've always been just a keen gardener, really," Smith told As It Happens guest host Gillian Findlay.

"But more recently, I've kind of got into growing competitive vegetables."

Alongside his day job as an IT manager, Smith has been growing fruits and vegetables for his family for many years. But in 2014, he heard about a giant pumpkin across the pond that was so heavy that it won a championship. 

"I was just really keen to have a go with that," he said. "I think it all kind of stemmed from that."

Smith says he went on to harvest the biggest beefsteak tomato in the U.K., which impressed his six-year-old son.

"Stuff that grows big, tall or fast are things that kind of grasp that kind of attention," Smith said.

But the gardener wanted to grow tomatoes in a way people had never seen before. That's when he came across the record, which hadn't been broken in over 10 years.

Before Smith took a shot at it, Graham Tranter held the record with 488 tomatoes on a single stem in Shropshire, England. With the help of new research and technologies, Smith grew hundreds more.

He studied scientific papers, tested soil samples in a laboratory, and then planted the seeds of two different tomato varieties of the multiflora cherry types in the greenhouse in his back garden.

One of the most important parts of growing cherry tomatoes, though, is taking care of the stems and sub-stems, which are called trusses.

"Half of the battle is really the logistics about how you either hold up or support or somehow coddle and look after [the trusses], in addition to the growing," Smith said. "There was a whole infrastructure built around it … to kind of support it in its weight.'

When Smith broke his first record with the cherry tomatoes in September 2021, his heavyweight stem carried 839 fully grown cherry tomatoes. His second record came from a stem on another plant in the same garden.

Smith's tomato farming methods may be the best in the world now, in terms of quantity, but they also keep his family and friends quite full.

"They tasted great. They did," he said.

Written by Mehek Mazhar. Interview produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo.