~ VINE TOMATO SEED part 2: - LARGE FRUITED TYPES
These are our large-fruited vine Tomatoes. See the index on the left for other types.
For an explanation of the differences between bush &
vine plant types, click here.
We really like tomatoes - and grow loads of them every year - but only the very best make it into the catalogue!
Sowing Information
IMPORTANT: Our tomato seed is tested and germinates really well, but you must provide heat for them to go.
Tomatoes are easy, but come from a warmer climate and so need heat to germinate. We test every single batch using the ISTA standard of 25 degrees C - and all will germinate well in 14 days if you provide this. At lower temperatures they will take longer or fewer will grow.
Without a heated proagator, beware that warmth during the day is not enough; they also mustn't get cold at night - they don’t want to risk germinating if there’s still a chance of a late frost. Often on a windowsill (or greenhouse or polytunnel), even if warm during the day, the temperature can fall enough at night to inhibit germination. So take them away to the centre of the room after supper and replace in the morning.
The other danger is cooking them, if using heat mats without a thermostat, or trays with lids, then even a brief period of unexpected full sun can raise the temperature high enough to kill the seeds if there’s not much airflow. If using these then do make sure there is plenty of ventilation.
Once germinated, the seedlings will happily grow on at lower temperatures of 18C-20C , so they don't need to be in the propagator for long.
Brandywine
A rightly famous heirloom beefsteak tomato from the 1800’s, named for its excellent rich flavour. In the USA this is as famous and widely-grown as Gardeners' Delight is over here. The flattened red fruit are really quite large - about 400g - so the vine should have sturdy support.
This excellent strain was recently selected for Euopean conditions and reintroduced by the Italian seedhouse 'Sementi Ingegnoli'.
20 seed £
De Colgar - THICK-SAUCE OR KEEPING TOMATO
A traditional variety from Spain, these are lovely orange tomatoes blushed with pink. In past times they were grown for winter storage, but we find they also make excellent thick tomato sauces and soups.
For storage, they were traditionally picked at the end of the summer and put carefully aside in a cool larder (much as you would store apples); they can 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 similar to the old french variety 'Jaune de Flamee'; once there were versions of this in every country , allowing storage for winter. But with the advent first of bottling, then freezing, and now supermarket-shipped tomatoes from all over the world, the old way of doing it seems to have died out.
Less juicy than normal tomatoes, which is why they keep well. So not for salad use, but excellent to make a really hearty tomato sauce or soup, and heavy-cropping.
20 seed, organic. £
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 Florence in Italy, where they know a thing or two about tomatoes.
Fat, red & gently ribbed fruit, tall vine.
22 seed £
Orange Banana
An incredibly productive plum tomato, it makes loads of large orange-coloured fruit.
Unusual and tasty, this has been a favourite of ours for many years – ideal for both salads and cooking. It makes great ketchup and sauces, and is one of the highest yielding plum tomatoes we have grown.
We got crates and crates of fruit from just 12 plants this year. We also find it much less prone to blossom end rot than many plum varieties.
22 seed £
Reisetomate' Pocketbook Vine Tomato
Well, how on earth to describe this? We think you'll just have to look at the photo. This is a rather unusual tomato from central Europe that grows what can only be described as a cluster of cherry tomatoes all fused together.
They can be twisted off from the fruit bit by bit and eaten, or you can just use it to scare your children . . . .
As well as looking very, very strange, they taste very nice, sweet and juicy with a thin skin.
20 seed, organic. £
'Mucho Miel' (Giant Salad Type)
A old heirloom variety of tomato given to us by José Confitas, an old gardener in the village in Spain 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, grow just as well in Wales as they did in Spain, & are a perfect size for sandwiches and salads.
20 seed £
Gigante Liscio (Maincrop Salad type)
Named 'Giant Delicious' by its creators, this big round tomato comes from a cross of 'Ponderosa' & 'St Louis' in the 1920's , to create the ultimate salad tomato. Constantly popular, since then it has been continually reselected for good flavour, strong plants, and large red fruit. Sadly now it is getting harder to find and it is not always available.
We really like this one, as it is one of the best flavoured of the big-fruited tomatoes - it has a particularly good balance of sweetness and acid.
A good maincrop red tomato, on a medium-tall vine.
20 seed, organic. £
Costoluto Fiorentino
This is another excellent large ribbed tomato from Italy, this time selected by the gardeners of Florence. Rarely available, this is the first time we've produced it since 2019.
Fat, red ribbed fruit, on a tall vine.
25 seed £
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.
20 seed £
'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.
20 seed, organic. £
Red Zebra Tall Vine Tomato
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 a 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.
20 seed £
Dr Carolyn Pink Big Cherry Vine tomato
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.
Not the highest-yielding tomato, but the flavour when ripe is very good indeed. Lots of good feedback from people.
20 seed £
Amish Paste (Giant Plum Tomato)
This variety comes originally from the Amish community. It is HUGE - one of the largest plum-type tomatoes we have ever seen. As well as size and productivity, we are really impressed by its flavour - 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 burgers too.
16 seed, organic. £
Purple Ukraine
A good early plum type tomato, this was originally from Irma Hemkel in Ukraine.
It does really well in the UK, (even in 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, extremely productive.
18 seed £
Ruby
In 2007 Frederick Denny sent us seed of several heirloom Bulgarian tomatoes he had collected - local varieties that people were saving at home - and we grew them all in a big trial. 'Ruby' was by far the best - early, productive, & with a good flavour, so we have offered it ever since.
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.
Beautiful red tomato from Bulgaria, very productive, tasty.
20 seed, organic. £
“Just to let you know how impressed I've been with the Tomato 'Ruby'. My small greenhouse overheated badly in July and all the other tomatoes I grew looked wan and cropped poorly afterwards... Ruby just powered on with healthy dark green leaves producing a steady supply of large, delicious tomatoes”. - Stephen
Ethel Watkins' Best
A large early tomato that did very well in our 2012 trials, and is still popular, with good sized fruit on short plants.
The key thing about this one is that the vines are not very tall - about 4ft - so great for the edge of the polytunnel or in a small greenhouse. And it fruits really quite early, making generously-set trusses of large round red tomatoes (tennis-ball sized).
A variety first sent to us by expert tomato collector and breeder Bill Minkey. Limited stocks!
18 seed £
Skykomish - REALLY GOOD FLAVOUR
A beautiful orange tomato bred by Tom Wagner, Skykomish was designed to be resistant to blight. It has done well for us in our trials, and has had good feedback across the country.
The tomatoes are quite large, a very pretty orange-yellow colour, with a good flavour. Kate's parents always grew lots of tomatoes outdoors in their garden (and got issued with our new varieties to try!) - they picked this one out as their definite favourite for taste.
A new tomato, with some blight-resistance, very good flavour, and a great colour.
18 seed £
Feo de Rio Gordo
This is a really massive tomato - we've included a picture of it next to a (rather large) mug here to try to give you an idea of the scale.Kate came by a selection of interesting tomatoes from a small local seed company on a visit to Seville a few years back. This variety proved to be a real stand-out both in terms of earliness (only the super-early varieties ripened before it) and flavour. It makes lots of fruit too.
The name translates as 'ugly, from the wide river' - well, they may not be the prettiest of tomatoes, but they taste amazing!
Very, very large red tomato, recommended for a greenhouse or polytunnel.
16 seed (it makes very few seeds!), organic. £
Buckflats Wonder - NEW
A really attractive med-large red salad tomato that was bred by Andy Pollock in northern Canada. It has a good flavour and what is special about this one is that he selected for years for the fruit not to be damaged in light autumn frosts.
Like any tomato, it still needs warm weather to grow well, but this one is helpful if you are in a marginal area where autumn can sometimes come early.
This is a short-vine plant; grow as a vine, but dont expect it to get too tall. Great for an extended harvest in short-season areas!
20 seed £
Home Stoop - NEW
An excellent tomato we found in 2018.
Home Stoop was created by Frank Morton, when he crossed the varieties "Homestead" and "Stupice" to combine their best qualities. He explains:
Stupice was damp hardy and cool adapted, it delivered great flavor and results in marginal situations, but the fruits were small. 'Homestead' was once a commercial variety in Florida, an exact opposite of the Northwest climate and soil. I liked the size and flavor, and soon a cross was born - Home Stoop
The name is also pun - a 'stoop' is the name for a porch or covered steps up to your veranda, so I like imagine sitting there peacefully in the evening sun watching your tomatoes ripening.
A short vine, to about 4 or 5ft, with slightly flattened 3" fruit and an excellent flavour.
18 seed £
Estate
Bred at Wild Garden Seeds to combine the best properties of Stupice, Homestead and Peron - perhaps the ultimate short-season salad tomato. A short vine to about 5-6ft, medium sized red fruit, with an excellent flavour & juicy flesh.
Just a few packets available each year; keep your own seed for future use if you like it.
20 seed £
Belarusian Heart
This is a very sweet, tasty and early-fruiting oxheart tomato; the fruits are medium-large, and have a delicious, complex flavour. They're good raw, but really come into their own as a variety to use cooked.
Another excellent ex-USSR variety from Andrei Barawovski in Ukraine, this was one of the best tasting in our 2018 trials.
18 seed £
Lotos
A wonderful tomato from Belarus,this is a tall vine that starts to fruit early, tastes great, and carries on long after the others have given up. The tomatoes are a beautiful translucent pale yellow, with a hint of orange blush depending on temperature. The flavour is really good both raw and cooked.
This variety is consistently one of the longest-cropping; ripening fruit long after others have given up. In an unheated conservatory we have picked the last tomatoes on Christmas Day.
Really good, a new favourite.
18 seed, organic. £
Peche Vilmorin - STUFFING or SAUCE TOMATO
An ancient variety, long thought lost, this was bred by Henri Vilmorin of the famous Andrieux-Vilmorin Seedhouse in France. Henri was the author of the invaluable reference book 'The Vegetable Garden' that was published in English in 1885 - and it's been in print ever since.
This unusual variety has a large hollow seed cavity - ideal for stuffing like a pepper, or just use as normal - and is one of the prettiest tomatoes we have grown, with a true peach-blush on the skin. Highly productive.
Passed to us via Owen Bridge of Annapolis Seeds. They ripen from the orangey colour in the photos to a deeper red-pink, and make large number of fruit over a long season.
18 seed £
Moskvich - HARDY & DELICIOUS
A great new variety from our 2018 Early Tomato Trials. We chose it from a collection of northern-adapted varieties as it sounded amazing - not only a rich flavour, but cold-resisitant; the parent plants were chosen after a hard frost killed off all the other baby tomatoes being grown at the time.
"Twisted Brook says if you only grow one tomato, let it be this one. Super cold hardy Russian variety, productive and great deep and rich flavour... red meaty slicer for sandwiches and fresh salsas. Equally perfect for sauces, pastes and canning. Good disease, split and cold resistance."
We found that it was indeed very productive, and also vigorous. If they start to branch, you do need to keep the sideshoots pinched out.
Hardy, northern-adapted medium-sized tomato with a good flavour!
20 seed £
Wentzell
An extremely tasty and very rare beefsteak tomato grown since the 1850s (!) by generations of the Wentzell family, who were the original homesteaders of what is now Windhorse Farm in Lunenburg County, Canada.
From Annapolis Seeds’ collection of northern-adapted tomato varieties - the large red-pink fruit have an excellent flavour, one of the best we have, and grow really well for us.
Short vines to about 4ft, tolerant of shorter/cooler summers.
18 seed, organic. £
Czech Breast
An excellent heirloom tomato, bred and named many years ago by ethnographer and botanist AV Frič. Our strain is a family heirloom from Klára Marková, who got it from her great grandmother, and remembered picking them as a child at the family farm.
She wrote:
"I have a variety of breast tomato from my great-grandmother and I have been growing it since 2005. Before, we have grown it in our family for another 35 years (maybe more). I saw it with my great-grandmother and we had it at home in the garden. It is yellow, and had an interesting shape - I & my brother as a child, liked to eat them raw, or with lettuce, and they can be hollowed out, stuffed and cooked."
This is another fantastic tomato given to us by Marek of Permaseminka Seeds, who has been researching and collecting old european tomato varieties for several years now. He thinks it is one of the best in his collection, and after our trials in 2020, we agree.
It is productive and has a great flavour.
18 seed £
Blue Beauty
Finally a large blue tomato that actually tastes great! The vines grow to about 5ft and make decent sized fruit, starting with patches of an intense blue-violet colour. When ripe this goes almost black and blends with red.
Just a few packets each year.
16 seed (it makes very few!), organic. £
Pink Dreams - NEW
Our fantastic new tomato, sent by Cliff Jenkins from seed he got in Bulgaria. Huge - really huge ( over half a kg)- glowing pink fruit with a truly excellent flavour. A perfect balance of acid and sweet, with a subtle smoky undertone; just perfect - this is the one we all rush to take home to cook with after deseeding.
It makes very few seeds, so just a few packets for you to try. Keep your own seed for future years!
16 seed £
"Outdoor Survivors" Mix - Selected for Growing Outdoors
Join in with the Outdoor Tomato Breeding Project! This is a wide ranging mix of not-yet-quite-stable experimental tomato varieties; the one thing they all have in common is surviving outdoors in the UK climate.
The original seed was gven to us by Julie Vestey who developed the mix in Norfolk. We have further selected here in Wales for ones that did well outdoors and also tasted good. The idea is that you can use this as a breeding population to select and develop your own preferred tomato variety.
Ideal for allotment growers with space for several plants - let us know how they perform for you.
20 seed, organic. £
Sowing Information
Just to be clear, this is a mix of about 12 different varieties, which themseleves are not stable. Do sow the whole packet to get as wide a range as possible. By keeping the seed from the best plant each year you'll have a stable variety in about 4 years' time that is unique to you! Also, remember that as you will be growing these outdoors you should sow slightly later than if you were going to grow them in a greenhouse or polytunnel.
San Marzano Vine Tomato
An heirloom originally from Peru, brought to Europe in the late 1700's to the small town of "San Marzano sul Sarno" near Naples.
It is longer and thinner than other plum tomatoes, with a slight point. It has a particularly good flavour.
Introduced commercially by the seed trade in 1926, it is now a world famous variety highly prized for making sauces.
20 seed £
