so many varieties

As someone from overseas ,(England ) I,m always amazed at the vast variety of veggies you have. especially toms. We,re starting to get a bit better over here now, but don,t begin to compare with what choice you have. A couple of years ago there was an article in a gardening mag about a chap in Britain that was growing heritage varieties of toms, and if you joined you could buy seeds, I bought some, and now like to try different ones each year, but they,re not always easy to come by, a lot of people here stick to the old and trusted varieties. i tried green sausage this year, it was o.k. but I,ve tasted better. The best I,ve ever tasted was green zebra, and I,ve not been able to find it since !If IO,d been sensible I should have saved some seeds, another I like is 'peach'? it,s large, and almost a soft skin, the flovour is fab.Hopefully we,ll continue to get offered more unusual varieties ,it,s when you put a salad in front of someone with different toms in, they always look amazed ,as if you,re trying to poison them LOL

Sue

I am on another list, One of the members on the list is a Brit Tomato Breeder. Plus another major tomato grower and plant scientist.

You might join this list and chat with Andy Davice and
Walter Pickett.

They way I understand it from them, is that the high humidity and diseases tolerance makes it tough for selections.


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Byron



This message was edited Saturday, Oct 13th 4:43 PM

Hallo, Sueone. For a huge range of tom seeds (whether heirloom or just different), various searches of the web have come up with lots of sites available to UK purchasers.

Have you tried www.terredesemences.com ? That's a good English name with perhaps hundreds of tom seeds available, from Canterbury.

There's totally tomatoes, too. The Americans set up a subsidiary very recently in Newton Abbott, and there's a special section for varieties that cope/thrive with/in our bad British climate

try www.totallytomatouk.com

there's Thomas Etty, too, on the web (though I haven't ordered, just viewed the site. Based in Bromley, Kent, I believe.
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~nfarley/thomas-etty/vegetables/tomato.htm

And HDRA have a large range in the Organic Catalogue.
http://www.hdra.org.uk/
And there's the St. Marthe seed producers for hundreds of varieties: HDRA source some varieties from them. And so on and so fifth. That should get you inspired!

thanks for the replies, I like to try something different, as well as some ordinary ones, I,ll check all those out and get ordering.

Sue

Byron,

Andy isn't a professional British tomato breeder. He's an amateur, like many who fool around breeding tomatoes, and he's trying to develop a Late Blight variety.

Walter Pickett isn't a tomato breeder either and he posts at Heirloon Gardening, not Tomatomania. Now retired, he did work for the US government in Niger ( not Nigeria)re agriculture.

Carolyn