We didn’t do well with tulips in Raleigh - but LOVE growing them here in Hendersonville! From today!

In rereading these articles, all I can say is….it’s so much fun! They are quaint, they are of a particular time, and a particular point in a particular growing friendship. Here we are, the first article from the third and last newsletter from the first volume. There are some meaty articles that will follow - there were 8 articles in all in this issue. That will take us into May! Here we go…

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C&C’s Corner

by Carolyn

IT’S TIME TO RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO Off The Vine if you started with Volume 1, #1. We hope you’ll stay with us. We’re keeping the subscription price at $5/3 issues for Volume 2 ($6 (US) Canadian $7(US) other foreign countries) but feel it’s not unreasonable to raise it to $7/3 issues for Volume 3. Volume 3 rates will be $8 (US) Canadian and $9(US) other foreign countries. We think that price is still very reasonable and wanted to let you know up front. Since we can’t send out separate notices for renewals, please send your money to me after you’ve read this issue. Your mailing label states the last issue you’ll receive; 13 means Vol. 1, #3 is your last issue, 32 means Vol. 3, #2 is your last issue, etc. the expiration dates are current as of 1/22/95. If you feel there is an error please call me or drop me a postcard. If I were perfect I wouldn’t be on earth! Upcoming articles will include home hybridization, documentation of Riesentraube’s existence in Philadelphia in the mid-1800’s including the wine recipe (yes, tomato wine), along with a larger discussion of the interesting and important field of food history, and article on Desert Sweet, a tomato which can grow in brackish (saline) waters, germination tricks, tomato folklore and how to determine seed purity as well as our usual reports, musings and suggestions.

Last issue we asked for folks to share with us their favorite large pink and red tomatoes. Well, the response was lousy! Only three people responded. We will not give in, or up … as the case may be! So, please let us know what your FAVORITE LARGE RED AND LARGE PINK TOMATOES are, why you like them and where seed can be obtained. Let’s define large as being roughly over 8 oz. in size. If you’re renewing, just slip in a piece of paper with your favorites or drop me a postcard. Unless you state otherwise we’ll feel free to publish your name and any comments. You’ve heard about our current favorites … let’s hear about YOURS!

Apparently there really is a large interest in heirloom tomatoes throughout the country. We continue be pleased with the number of new subscriptions we are receiving. Organic Gardening mentioned Off The Vine as a resource; the article was a surprise to us! Both Jeff McCormack at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Linda Sapp at Tomato Growers Supply have mentioned Off The Vine in their new catalogs. And our names are mentioned as the donors of certain varieties in both the Southern Exposure and Johnny’s new seed catalogs. More about this will be found in the article on Seed Sources in this issue. I am writing an article about the USDA varieties for the Spring issue of the Historical Gardener. This is a newsletter I think many of you might enjoy because it deals with various aspects of heirloom/historic vegetables, fruits, flowers, gardens, people, etc. (The Historical Gardener, 1910 North 35th Place, Mt. Vernon, WA 98273-8981; $12 for four issues/year). Finally, I have accepted an invitation from the Rodale Institute to present a workshop on heirloom tomatoes which will be given on August 23, 1995 at the Institute in Kutztown, PA.

In our last issue we mentioned that The Tomato Club newsletter had temporarily ceased publication. It had, but Bob Ambrose has decided ot resume publication with the first “new issue” being January/February 1995. Subscribers’ original subscriptions will be honored. The new subscription rate is $12.95 for six issues per year. The address is: The Tomato Club, 114 E Main Street, Bogota, NJ 07603.

Our featured “tomato” person in this issue is Thane Earle. Thane is a long time member of Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) and I know many of you will be surprised at what he has done and what he does now when he isn’t growing tomatoes. Dr. John Rahart of Bosque, New Mexico has written an article about adaptation of tomato varieties to local conditions, an article we promised you in our last issue. John is currently on a “sabbatical” from the practice of dentistry. And yes, for those of you who recognize the last name, John’s father was Andrew Rahart as in Andrew Rahart’s Jumbo Red , Pink Ping Pong and Myone. Dr. Tad Smith has written a timely article on the new threat posed by the appearance of a new strain of late blight, which is the same fungus that caused the great Irish Potato famine. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in plant pathology from Virginia Tech in 1990. While in graduate school he maintained his interests in tomatoes and gardening. He obtained seed for Yellow Oxhart tomato from a family in southwestern Virginia and encouraged Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to introduce it. He also developed several unusual tomato varieties through hybridizing, including Purple Perfect and Snowstorm. He worked for the USDA Forest Service on control of dogwood anthracnose for 2 years in western North Carolina. Later he researched peanut diseases for 1 year at the University of Georgia, Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton. He is currently employed by Rohm and Haas Co. in Spring House, PA as a plant pathologist in the Agricultural Products Research Group. We are offering some of his F2 seeds for growout as discussed in the article on Seed Sources. I mentioned a few of my favorite tomatoes in the last issue and Craig is sharing with you some of his “winners” in this issue. Craig has also written an article describing our fascinating experience with the USDA varieties we grew this past summer; the second half of the article will be published at a later date. Finally, I’ve written an article about seed sources for heirloom tomatoes which I hope you find useful. I also describe in that article some interesting F2 seeds we are making available to you.

My garden had not revealed all of its secrets by the time we published our last issue, so here are the highlights. The most satisfying accomplishment was getting a few seeds from Magnus! Magnus is one of the previously thought extinct varieties released by the Livingston Seed Co. in 1900. It’s supposed to be a pink potato leaf variety. Craig got one regular leaf seedling out of 50 seeds and after TWO MONTHS of germination I got two seedlings up, both of which were potato leaf. I breathed on them, to increase the carbon dioxide concentration, I conducted ceremonies over them to ensure rapid growth … and was successful! I Fed-Exed one plant to Craig and planted the other one. Craig’s plant arrived in find shape but took an unspecified nosedive in his garden, leaving me as the nervous tomato mom with the only growing plant. Fast forwarding to frost time, there was great concern but several fruit made it to maturity or were on the turn. Remember, seed saved from fruit with any color will be viable. The USDA varieties with the best taste, for me, were Optimus, Redfield Beauty, Landreth, Essex Wonder, Golden Queen, Green Gage, White Queen and Paragon. Magnus couldn’t be easily rated because of the cool Fall weather which makes all late tomatoes a bit watery and acid in my zone 5 growing area. Golden Queen was a real winner as was Aunt Ginny, which is not just another pink potato leaf. It is GREAT with respect to taste, yield and vine! Green Gage was a surprise. It’s a very old (probably pre-1800) yellow plum which has green gel around the seeds until ripe and when picked unripe it is bitter but when the green gel changes to yellow it is delicious. White Queen, a USDA variety, is the best white I’ve grown in terms of taste and color and Bulgarian Triumph, a non-spectacular 4 oz. red was an outstanding new taste favorite. German Red Strawberry was again terrific and I discovered I know have a pink mutant of Cuostralee; same tomato but probably a single mutation from yellow skin (red) to colorless skin (pink). The new Latvian varieties Ilze’s Yellow Latvian and Velican were very good but not outstanding and the same was true of the new Ukrainian varieties, Olga’s Red and Bely Naliv Ukrainian. The tow new Yugoslavian varieties from my colleague in Computer Science were outstanding: Yasha Yugoslavian is a big pink heart with wispy foliage and Crnkovic Yogoslavian is a big pink beefsteak with regular foliage, terrific taste and yields. The last one I want to mention is Orange Strawberry. The two are not related. Marjorie said that Orange Strawberry was a chance seedling that appeared in a pack of seeds of Pineapple (bicolor) obtained commercially. She’s grown all the orange tomatoes offered by that company and says it resembles none of them. It appeared in her 1993 garden, grew pure for both of us in 1994 and I’m listing it in the SSE Annual with the hopes that it really is pure. Perhaps I should have grown it out one more year before offering it, so don’t get mad if it isn’t pure; it was so good I took a chance!

This is a very sad story. One day I noticed tomatoes on a plant at the end of a row but the label had disappeared. It was a replacement plant for one that got hooked out by the cultivator tines and then I remembered I hadn’t labeled it because there was no way I was going to forget it. Wrong! It was a potato leaved variety so it didn’t take too much time to establish the fact that it was one of the many plants I was growing out of an alleged orange-red Brandywine (more about this in the seed source article). So why the interest? Well, it had the biggest tomato I’ve ever seen in my life, bar none. Gordon Graham, I was thinking of YOU! Gordon is the current World’s record holder with a 7 lb. 12 oz. giant (and an Off the vine subscriber). To be honest this huge tomato was a bit rotten on one side when I discovered it, so taste tests were out of the question. Its sister fruit, although much smaller, had superb taste. I processed the seeds, carefully spread them out of the paper plate, checked them at one week and found that a mouse had eaten the seeds. End of sad story.

In our last issue I mentioned that Red Brandywine was possibly a variant of Brandywine (pink). It is not. Red Brandywine is Amish and no doubt was named Brandywine after the river of that name in Pennsylvania, but it is a regular leaf plant, not potato-leaf, and the fruit are red and round, quite unlike its pink namesake. Actually there are some folks who think Brandywine (pink) is from Ohio, but that’s another story.

We would love to have articles submitted by our readers. We stated in the first issue that we wanted Off the Vine to be interactive and that can’t happen without your participation. So if you have something you want to say, write it. If we can use it we will! Are any of you selling/trading heirlooms with restaurants? We’d love to hear about what they like and how you do it because others are interested. Do you have weird and/or wonderful recipes for heirloom tomatoes? Do you have an amusing story about tomatoes you’ve known, loved or hated? Do people make fun of you because you don’t grow the latest hybrids? Let us know about it.

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Even the intros into each issue, typically penned by Carolyn, are crammed with information. One more amusing note - Carolyn was a Word Perfect user, me a MS Word user - formatting was always a bit of fun back in the day! There is simply a lot of information to process in this wonderful piece of writing by Carolyn.