VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans - French Beans - Runner Beetroot Broad Beans Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery, & Celeriac Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Herbs Kale Kohl Rabi Leaf Greens for Cooking Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens ( for cooking) Onions - spring sowing Onions - overwintering Onions - special types Oriental Greens for cooking & salads Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Root Parsley Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Swedes Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vines - Cherries Tomatoes : Vines - Larger Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Yacon

~ VINE TOMATO SEED part 2: - LARGE FRUITED TYPES ~

These are our large-fruited vine Tomatoes. See the index on the left for other types.

We really like tomatoes - and grow loads of them every year - but only the very best make it into the catalogue!

For an explanation of the differences between bush & vine plant types, click here.

'Doctor Carolyn' GOOD FLAVOUR

We’re pleased to offer what may well be the best tasting tomato there is, named after tomato breeder Dr Carolyn Mayle.

This is a medium height vine with spherical, glowing round pink tomatoes about 2” in diameter.

The flavour is fantastic and this is a special strain we have reselected ourselves for bigger, fruit. Interestingly, several years after we chose this in our taste trials, we discovered that it was in fact bred from our other very good flavoured tomato, Galina.

We'll be perfectly honest - the yield of these is not quite as high as some other varieties, but the flavour when ripe is very good indeed. Lots of good feedback from people..

Order ToCa - 18 seed £2.72

Ben is rather fond of this one, as it is one of the better flavoured of the big-fruited tomatoes - it has a particularly good sweet-acid flavour.

Maincrop red tomato, Medium Vine.

Order ToGL - 25 seed £1.87

Costoluto Genovese
A delicious Italian variety ideal for salads or cooking.

Tall, vigorous plants start to fruit early, and it's a steady producer, cropping over a long period. Gives a heavy yield of huge, juicy, ribbed red fruit over a long season.

Brought to you from the gardeners of Genoa in Italy, where they know a thing or two about tomatoes.

Fat, red & gently ribbed fruit, tall vine.

Order ToCG - 30 seed £1.94

'Rose de Berne' Large Pink Salad Tomato
This was sent to us by Frank Kiersblick, as one of his favourite and heaviest-setting traditional tomatoes. He was right! It was one of our best performers in our 2008 trials.

The tall vines make glowing-pink tomatoes. The fruit are quite large, but not quite as big as a ‘beefsteak’ type.

It is a high yielding, juicy, and particularly tasty variety from the continent with very heavy trusses giving crops of several pounds per vine.

Order ToRB - 20 seed £1.94

What is remarkable is that the colours are all swirled together inside.  The meaty, juicy fruits are a golden yellow colour, blushed ruby red in the middle.

We think this is the prettiest tomato we've ever grown. And it tastes fantastic too. The vines are tall and require strong support to hold all the tomatoes.

Order ToGM - 25 seed £1.35

Ethel Watkins' Best

The key thing about this is that the vines are not very tall - about 4ft - & it fruits really quite early, making generously-set trusses of large round red tomatoes (tennis-ball sized).

Variety first reccommended to us by tomato collector Bill Minkey - seed crop grown in Wales.

Order ToEW - 20 seed £1.94

'Purple Ukraine' Tomato
A good early plum type tomato, this was originally from Irma Hemkel in the Ukraine.

It did really well in our trials, (despite endless grey weather!) , making tall plants that soon set trusses of really large, deep purple plum tomatoes the size and shape of a goose egg.

The tomatoes are both beautiful and delicious in salads, but they are also tasty cooked.

The foliage is very attractive too, with dark green leaves and an interesting 'feathery' appearance.

Purple, great for cooking & salads.

Order ToPU - 22 seed £1.94

'Green Zebra'
Green Zebra is a very special tomato, created in 1983 by Tom Wagner of 'Tater Mater Seeds' - a flavour-obsessed tomato and potato breeder who has worked all his life creating new varieties.

It is thought by many people to be one of the tastiest tomatoes ever. Don't be put off by the colour, it really is ripe when bright green, there's been 30 years of breeding to make it that way! And the flavour is fantastic.

Ben met Tom in Oxford in 2009 and they spent a happy couple of days discussing tomato varieties and potato breeding, so we're really pleased to offer Tom's tomato in the catalogue now.

Order ToGZ - 24 seed £1.94

'Red Zebra'
Nice tall vines, this is a very rare variety with round red tomates that develop lighter golden zebra stripes as they ripen, with a particularly good flavour.

Red Zebra was discovered by Jeff Dawson in the late 1990’s, when he spotted just one different-type plant in his huge field of Green Zebra tomatoes.

Like all good farmers, he always tried out any unusual plants that chance brought his way, and this one was indeed a lucky find - it still had the great taste of the original, but with beautiful red-gold colour. After a bit of selection to stabilise it, he first offered the new variety via a seedsavers network in 2003.

A great flavour as well as being very pretty.

Order ToRZ - 20 seed £1.94

Amish Paste

After much tasting throughout the season, we are really impressed by this one - a new addition to our favourites.

The tall vines set pretty early in the season, and make nice red fruit about the size of an apple which weigh up to 1lb each. Not only was it one of the first to flower, but it just kept on making tomatoes for month after month.

The fruits are good. Very dense fleshed, with few seeds - but still a really good tart flavour, so ideal for cooking, ketchups and bottling. And they cook down to an incredibly rich and sweet sauce.

But our most amusing use is as our customary snack of fried tomato on toast - a single slice will do an entire piece of toast:

Large red plums, ideal for sauces , but actually, they're very nice fresh in salads and hamburgers too.

Order ToAP - 22 seed £1.94

'Mucho Miel' (Giant Salad Type)

A old heirloom variety of tomato given to us by Jose Confitas, an old gardener in the village where we used to live. These tomatoes were grown by his family for 'years and years for ever' as he put it, and the name means 'lots of honey'.

The large red fruit are indeed sweet and juicy, and borne on tall vigorous vines. They taste great, & are a perfect size for sandwiches and salads.

We managed to fit this into our annual seed-bank growouts last year, and have a few hundred packets available now for you to try. Keep your own seed if you like it!

Order ToMM - 20 seed £1.94

De Colgar (Storage Tomato)

This is one for all you self-sufficiency types out there.

A traditional class of tomato that is pretty much extinct now, these are nice round orange-pink tomatoes bred for winter storage.

They ripen a bit later than the others. The idea is that you pick them at the end of them summer and put them carefully aside in your cool larder (much as you would store apples); with a bit of care they keep until January! We have tried this several times and it really does work.

(Just as with apples, you need a slightly humid but well-ventilated store, with a steady temperature ideally about 8-10 C. But if you don't get it quite right they still store better than other tomatoes.)

They are very similar to the old french variety 'Jaune de Flamee'; we think that there probably were versions of this in every country so that there were tomatoes available for winter salads. But with the advent first of bottling, then freezing, and now supermarket-shipped tomatoes from Spain, these are all extinct.

Less juicy than normal tomatoes, with a thick skin, which is why they keep. Vine to 5 feet tall.

Order ToDC - 20 seed £2.72

~ HEIRLOOM BULGARIAN TOMATOES~

In 2007 Frederick Denny sent us a whole collection of tomatoes he had found in the small village he had moved to in Bulgaria. He had asked around for local varieties that people were saving at home,
and tracked down old gardeners who were maintaining traditional strains in their plots.

The seeds arrived carefully wrapped in small sachets made from old newspaper and we grew them out in 2008 and 2009 as a preliminary trial. Since then we have produced some of the better ones for you to try at home and we offer these here.

At the moment we have three varieties available, plus another very fine Bulgarian tomato we were given at a party.

If you like them do save your own seed as we're not sure when we'll be able to offer them again.

'Ruby'

The vines don't grow too tall for us (so good at the shorter edge of a greenhouse) but make a good crop of really nice rounded red tomatoes for a long season.

Do give it a go, & save your own seed if you like it.

Beautiful red tomato from Bulgaria. Seed produced for us by our grower Ian Hearn, who runs an organic box scheme near Cardigan..

Order ToRU - 20 seed £1.89

Baba

These are nice cooking tomatoes & make particularly good rich sauces as well as being good in salads.

Order ToBa - 18 seed £2.00

Long Pink Bulgarian

A very good traditional variety, with tall vines that make pink tomatoes the shape of a goose egg. The original seed of this one were given to us by a Bulgarian legal student at a party - we sadly don't remember much more about their history or background, as it was quite a good party! However, the tomato does very well for us here in Wales, and we are pleased to have added it to the catalogue.

The picture was taken with our old camera and it hasn't really shown the colour correctly - the tomatoes are really noticeably pink.

Order ToLP - 18 seed £1.99

Saving Tomato Seed:

Here you can seed the seed and juice squeezed into a jar & let ferment for 3 days (no more, no less!)

Good seeds sink and bad ones float.

(And, yes, it is supposed to be mouldy & smelly)

Water is added and poured off several times to clean them, the seed is rinsed in a sieve and put on a plate to dry.

Detailed seed-saving instructions are included with your seeds, so you can do this yourself.

And of course this is only possible because these are all real, non-hybrid varieties.