Mexican Midget Tomato
5th January 2018.
At the moment we are researching 8 varieties of tomato at our little college of Horticulture at the factory garden.
All the 255 girls we support in Secondary school get a chance to see and taste them as well as how to grow them.
Besides eating some we save the seeds as they are all open pollinated (because we don’t grow anything genetically modified by Monsanto and their partners).
We are looking for varieties which are pest resistant, or those where we can control the pests using plants extracts available to us.
As with many of our seeds we got these from Irish Seed Savers in Scarriff, County Clare, Ireland, a unique organisation who have supported us for the past ten years.
They Say:
This tomato caught the attention of a lot of visitors this season. Very long and gangly growth habit up to the tunnel roof and on, a habit rooted in the wild ancestory of vining tomatoes. However, it’s worth it. Sends out widely spaced trusses, so helps reduce build up of fungal disease. Each truss was loaded with sweet delicious red cherry tomatoes. The fruit holds well over a long period too, good for the market gardener, though as seed savers, we had to ‘wait’ a long time for the fruit to over-ripen for seed. Trialled outdoors, they were also very successful (we didn’t pinch out the side shoots) and didn’t succumb to blight until well into autumn.
For a start we are growing them in a greenhouse.
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