Our Three Tomatoes

Here's a photo of three tomato plants that you can't buy in the shops. In this photo are UK2000, Village Red & Macalister all tomatoes I've had a hand in.

 

UK2000 originated in a garden on a dairy farm I was working on at the time. The farmer said to me he had these self sown tomatoes come up in his garden, would I like some. That was nearly 30 years ago and these were the only tomatoes we grew for over 20 years. If they were hybrids, we have stabilised them in that time.

 

Village Red is a tomato that originated in plant pots that I had grown some Yellow tomatoes for a grower from Canada, so is a sport of this variety, but red in colour and a nice beefsteak. It has thrown both regular leaves and potato leaves in that time, but I have now settled on the regular leaf form and it is now stable. The very first fruit off this variety was cut in half and it looked like velvet inside, so I originally named it Red Velvet, but was told by a well know tomato person in the USA that the name was taken, so I just named it Village Red, after where we lived and the fruit colour.

 

Lastly, back in 2019 I grew an orange fruited tomato, but found it too sweet for me, so I took the pollen from it and crossed the plant with Nicoleta, a red Romanian tomato I had growing in the garden at the same time. The following season, the resulting fruit was a yellow globe tomato, with fantastic flavour, which we loved here. I named this variety Macalister, after our river here in Maffra and last season when I grew seedlings for this variety, I got a plant that threw pink coloured fruit which was also tasty like the yellow. So this year I am purposely growing both the yellow and the pink forms of this tomato.

 

When I grow tomatoes here, I always try and pick tasty varieties, whether the ones I grow for myself or ones to sell. Sorry, but only UK2000 has been given out, the other two are just grown here, because we love them.