2010 Tomatoes

The Ananas Noire/ Black Pineapple Tomato is a most unusual tomato! This tomato appeared in a Pineapple tomato patch and was developed and stabilized by Pascal Moreau, a horticulturist in Belgium. The sweet fruity spicy taste is reminiscent of both black and bicolor tomatoes. The flavor often changes within the same fruit! Scrumptious.

The Amish Paste Tomato is a late 1800’s Amish heirloom from Lancaster, Pa via Wisconsin. Great sauce tomato, sweet and heavy yielding. Plants are laden with whopping clusters of deep red, one pound, acorn or heart shaped fruits that have thick, sweet flesh with few seeds.

The Striped or Speckled Roman Tomato has gorgeous, medium sized, oblong orange red fruits with wavy, yellow stripes and an excellent sweet and savory flavor. Looks like a novelty tomato, yet offers serious flavor, production and color. Adds interest to any dish with its vibrant color and stripes. This is an exceptional variety, probably the best salad tomato around, yet the excellent flavor, sweetness and good firm yet meaty texture make this ideal for creating sauces too. Makes a wonderfully unique dark red, very rich and fruity overtoned sauce! The breeder of this tomato is John Swenson, a marvelous seedsman. He has given us treasures of seeds and plants from his collection through the years. Speckled Roman was a fortuitous cross, in John's garden, of Antique Roman and Banana Legs, and the plants have the distinct nipple of the latter. He stablized the cross, and the rest is history - and gardening pleasure.

The "Costoluto" or ribbed tomatoes have been treasured in Italy and the Mediterranean since the early 18th Century. This was one of the first kinds of tomato to be introduced in Spain in the 1500s, and then on to Italy and France.

An improved version of the famous classic that has more disease resistance and higher yields of 10-14 oz. luscious, meaty, dusky pink tomatoes with few seeds and are the perfect sandwich tomato all summer long. In the 1940s, "Radiator Charlie" sold seedlings for $1 each and paid off his $6,000 mortgage!

AMISH CANNER TOMATO ~A good old fashioned "tomatoey" taste, great attributes for canning and preserving as well as all purpose fruit. You can happily eat this one out of hand, cook with it, and use it in salads as well as for canning of course.

James Chalk of Norristown, Pennsylvania developed this tomato in 1899 as a cross between "Hubbard's Curled Leaf" and "Perfection”. It was commercially introduced in 1904 by the Stokes Company. When ripe it has a tender buttery texture, just bring your salt shaker to your garden! A hint of spiciness with some acidity gives it its remarkable flavor. William Woys Weaver, famous foodways author, likes this tomato with steamed crab. This is one of the few great tomatoes listed in the “Slow Food USA Ark of Taste".

Perfect 8-12 ounce (oz) globes of rich crimson with not a mark on them. This one has that old time flavor I remember from the tomatoes in Mr. Gunther's garden. Mr. Gunther, wherever you are, I want to belatedly, truly apologize! My mother was raised in the tropics and had never seen a groundhog (or grundsau as they say in PA Dutch.) She was a sucker for all baby animals, so when I brought home a cute, tiny baby groundhog of course she let me keep him. She didn't know what it was. My father didn't want to break my heart. So the little guy got bigger and thrived. When a neighbor informed us it was “a varmint- we shoot those" she broke into tears. When little Gunther (named after our gardening neighbor) got too big to keep indoors, we did a midnight foray into Mr. Gunther's garden and let him loose amongst the cabbages. We knew Mr. Gunther never used a gun, so we assumed he'd be fine. And that was only one of my many unusual pets. More tales later.... Anyway, this is what I call a typical old fashioned tomato, big round, red, sweet-tart. It did have potato leaf foliage but that is the only identifying factor. Try this good ole boy, you won't regret it

Genuine Mennonite Heirloom~ Scarce~ Just a great all round tomato that kept on pumping out flawless fruit thru thick and thin and never stopped. I yanked the darn plants out still producing in mid November! If you want lots of tomatoes, especially for canning, juicing and processing, then this is the one for you. Get this great old Mennonite heirloom, don't bother with those so called improved new tomatoes out there.

HOWARD GERMAN TOMATO ~VERY RARE~Local Pennsylvania Heirloom - The locals here in Amish country also call them "Pepper Tomatoes". I have never seen these exact same tomatoes grown anywhere else. Prolific harvests of 5-1/2 inch long, weirdly pointed paste tomatoes that weigh about 5- 8 ounces (although this year they were huge and averaged more like 10- 14 ounces). These are very meaty with a good, rich flavor. They have virtually no seeds, maybe 6 or so per fruit. An old scarce variety great for canning, paste, or sauces. Also delicious right off the vine in salads. Just the best all purpose tomato I have ever grown. Very resistant to disease and bugs, as well. Still seen here in Amish country, but elsewhere it is a really rare tomato.

PINK TRIFELE RUSSIAN TOMATO

Good meaty taste perfect for eating out of hand, in salads or for making your own Glasnost Russian Spaghetti Sauce

ASHHABADH'S HEART UKRAINIAN OXHEART TOMATO,Very pretty top shaped fruit weighing in at 8 ounces (oz) or more. Very firm and meaty and suitable for use as a paste tomato.

BALLAD TOMATO ,." Large plant with big pink fruits. Rather early for such large fruit. Nice sweet well balanced flavor, on slightly elongated boat shaped fruits on sturdy 7+ foot vines. Sergey said it was a small bush, but believe me, here in the US it was huge! The fruits all weighed over one pound as you see in the photo, covering my whole hand.

MONOMAKH`S CROWN,Well, the Shapka Monomakha is a crown on display at the Kremlin. It was supposedly presented to Prince Vladimir Monomakh of Kiev (1053 - 1125) by his grandfather, Byzantine Emperor Constanine IX. It came to symbolize Russia's claim to heritage to Byzantium. It was used to crown Russian monarchs from the 1400's until Peter the Great in the 1700's. I believe this tomato really is the 'crown' of Russian tomatoes.As you can obviously see by the photo this is one "bragging rights" kind of tomato. And that wasn't even the biggest one. . Very meaty and dense interior. Great old fashioned taste.

Red, midseason, very meaty and firm, up to 800 grams (about 3/4 pound). Famous Russian amateur variety. Average height of plant- 200 cm, average size of fruit- 400 grams, average yield per plant-12 fruit. Local favorite beefsteak!"

But I did notice that there seems to be no other tomato that looks like this one except for the antique etching in William Woys Weaver's wonderful book Heirloom Vegetable Gardening. On page 337 there is a reference to a lost tomato called "Crimson Cluster" introduced in 1869. He says of it: "it was a scarlet red tomato, beautifully shaped and covered in golden yellow flecks. No one knows for certain what it tasted like in spite of helpful Victorian descriptions, but the striped tomatoes of England like Tigerella, or the Schimmeig Stoo of the Isle of Man, must be lineal descendents". Perhaps this is the missing "Crimson Cluster"? The description certainly matches exactly and "Speckled Siberian" truly looks like this picture.