Heritage vegetable review Potato: Edzell Blue

Age: before 1915
My supplier: home-saved tubers (this variety is now becoming much more readily available in the UK, so not hard to find)
Pros: gorgeous colour, trouble free
Cons: temperamental to cook

Edzell Blue is certainly a looker, there's no disputing that. The colour is magnificent when newly harvested and scrubbed ... really amazingly vibrant purple. It dries to a muted deep mauve which has an almost metallic sheen. Very pretty indeed. And when you cut it open the flesh is a pure bright white and looks lovely in contrast to the skin. The skin is shiny with freckles and some variation in colour. Tubers are a bit smaller than a modern spud and usually smooth and rounded with quite deep eyes.

Presumably it originates in Edzell, Angus (Scotland). It was first referred to in 1915 but is thought to have been bred in the 19th century.

The flavour is nice. It's not the most wildly exciting flavour I've ever tasted in a potato, but it is nice. Mild and delicate. Texture tends towards the floury end of the spectrum.


There is a definite art to cooking it (no doubt that's one reason it's rarely offered in the shops) and I haven't mastered it myself. It tastes lovely as a new potato when it's small, but boiling it is not an easy process, because the flesh seems to absorb water more than most varieties. Unless you get the timing absolutely right it falls to bits. Mash is an option, but it tends to be watery for the same reason. Baking is less hit and miss, although the spuds are on the small side for baking (not that it bothers me, 'cause they need less baking time if they're small) but they don't really seem suited to this either. They have too much dry matter in them and go very floury, and the baked flavour isn't very inspiring. The skins go extremely crispy and leathery and take a lot of chewing. Roasting seems to be the most satisfying option, and very nice it is too. Steaming might also work well. But all in all Edzell Blue is not what you'd call versatile.

And if you were hoping it might keep that colour when you cooked it, you'd be disappointed. The ice white flesh stays the same but the skin goes a brown colour like any other potato. And if you boil it the water will go dark green as the purple colour dissolves.

Edzell Blue is a Second Early type. The plants grow fairly upright with lightish bright green leaves, and were trouble free in my garden. They produce very pretty pure white frilly flowers with golden centres, which are really lovely. The flowers drop once they've faded and don't produce 'apples'. It was the first variety I harvested (June) and the yields were pretty good. No blight, because they are harvested before it strikes.

So on the whole my impressions of Edzell Blue are positive. It's not one of my special favourites, but that's partly a matter of taste. It's very nice and well worth growing.

The lost gardens

Photographed in the garden today, a glass lantern with one of last year's leaves still stuck to it.

I try to minimise the amount of ranting I do on my blog, but every now and then I have to allow my bleeding-heart pinko leftie idealism to burst out. So here goes.

Garden Organic (or the HDRA as I've always known it) is concerned at the moment about the loss of domestic garden space in the UK because of the way the planning rules are currently defined. Because gardens are technically regarded as brownfield sites it's very easy to get planning permission to "redevelop" them with housing. And don't I bloody know it – this practice is rife in Cheltenham. It's quite a green and leafy town and a lot of older houses here were originally built with good sized gardens, and what developers have been doing is either building extra infill housing in the gardens or, worse still, demolishing the original house and building a whole cluster of new ones on the site, destroying the gardens and endowing the new houses with barely enough green space to air a handkerchief.

Yeah yeah, it's good for the economy, blah blah, and it's partly NIMBYism on my part because I don't like my beautiful historic home-town being spoiled by people who are just out to make money and who don't have to live with their own ugly contributions to the urban landscape. But it's happening on a much more insidious local-scale level too, which is nothing to do with the planning laws and is entirely down to people's attitudes and priorities.

I live in a street where all the houses have good sized front gardens and driveways big enough for one or two cars. A sizeable proportion of residents are elderly people who constantly amaze me by keeping their gardens so lovely. What happens when the elderly people pass on to other places in this world or the next is that the houses are bought by people who watch Channel 4 property development programmes ... not to live in but to rip out all the original features and chuck them in a skip, "add value" by building out-of-proportion extensions, and raze the front garden with a JCB and replace it with gravel so that the people they flog it on to at a vast profit can park their Jeeps on it.

I'm feeling a bit sore about this at the moment because there was another one only this week, a little way along the road. A developer has done up a house and put it on the market, and one afternoon along came the JCB and the dumper truck, and erased, in the space of two hours, the large mature front garden full of attractive plants that had been nurtured and tended for 70 years. By the end of the afternoon there was a nice flat expanse of gravel in its place, and the SOLD board went up within days.

I completely understand why a lot of people don't want the hassle of caring for a garden when they're working full time and that they'd rather use the space for off-road parking, which is a godsend to multiple-car households and certainly in short supply. So it's an obvious thing for both developers and residents to want to do. But the number of front gardens left in our street is dwindling very fast in favour of a boring gravelled sterility (and more cars) and it's a damned shame I say.

It may be adding value to all the properties as the street goes upmarket, but it will mean an impoverished environment for all of us in the long run.

Heritage vegetable review Broad bean: Red-flowered

Age: 18th century
Background: Also called "Crimson-flowered". Rescued and revived by the Heritage Seed Library.
My supplier: W Robinson & Son
Pros: gorgeous flower colour, gorgeous scent, good blackfly resistance, lovely flavour
Cons: none that I noticed

This has to be my favourite broad bean ever ... the old and un-named red-flowered or crimson-flowered variety. I love it. The flowers are the most beautiful colours and glow in the sunlight.

Clearly others love it too because it's had a surge of popularity in recent years. There are still only a handful of suppliers selling it but it's been busily doing the rounds at seed swaps, so it's not too difficult to find these days.

Very simple descriptive names like "Crimson-flowered" ("Early long purple", "Tall white" etc) are often an indication of a variety's age, because it wasn't really until the Victorian era that romantic names like "Lazy Housewife" and "Egyptian Turnip-Rooted" became de rigeur. Red-flowered broad beans were described in seed lists in the late 18th century, and what we have today is either the same one or a close variant of it. The variety seems to have come close to dying out, until an elderly lady from Kent donated it to the Heritage Seed Library in 1978. It had been grown by her market-gardener father, who was given the seeds during his childhood years a century earlier.

It's a smaller and more dainty plant than a conventional broad bean and grows to about 3ft with three red-tinged stems which usually stay up without support, at least until the podding stage. Leaves are a bright greyish green and fairly rounded. The pods are small and grow almost vertically, and the beans are pale green and about two-thirds the size of a modern type.

But they are very abundant, so yields are good overall. And the flavour and texture are fantastic. It has a slight firmness and mealiness in the texture which you wouldn't find in most varieties today but it's a nice kind of mealiness. And the flavour is sweet and lovely without any trace of bitterness. The beans cook to a nice bright green colour and only need to be lightly steamed.

The real wow-factor of this variety though is definitely its flowers. The crimson colour is so deep, voluptuous and translucent, and on spring days when the flowers are backlit by bright sunlight low on the horizon they can leave you staring at them for minutes on end in drop-jawed wonderment (they did me, anyway). And one of the unsung blessings of broad beans is that their flowers have a lovely scent. Red-flowered has the most incredibly beautiful smell ... and I speak as someone who finds a lot of flower scents headachey and nose-curdling. It's just delicate and lovely, and it stops you in your tracks as you walk up the garden path. The bees love it too and I noticed they were chewing their way through the base of the flowers to get inside them.


Other than a bit of nibbling by bean or vine weevils, who give the leaves frilly edges by eating little notches all the way round, the plants seemed fairly resistant to everything, pest-wise. And most significantly, only mildly bothered by blackfly.

Blackfly is the ubiquitous and inevitable pest of broad beans. For those who don't use sprays, the end of the broad bean season is often brought about when the plants (and pods) are so encrusted with solid black you can't even get hold of them to harvest them any more. So when I first grew this variety in 2005 and found it was completely untroubled by blackfly until the last week or two of the season, I was quite excited. I grew it again in 2006 and the same thing happened ... no blackfly at all until very late, and even then just a smattering (though there was some variation in infestation between plants ... I saved seed from the ones which stayed cleanest, which also happened to be the reddest-flowered).

As far as I'm concerned, this alone makes it priceless in the garden. I've lost so many broad bean crops to blackfly, which are quite disgusting things when they build up to critical mass, and the usual organic methods (pinching the tips and hosing the blackfly off) have limited impact. So to find a variety that just gets on and grows untroubled, looking immaculate right up until harvest time, is quite a coup.

The 'proper' colour for the flowers is a deep wine red with darker burgundy underneath, which fade slightly with age to a deep carmine. But there's been a lot of variability among the ones I've grown and I don't know if it's just me. In 2005 I grew six, and no two were the same. Colours, markings and combinations varied from pale pink, dark cerise, burgundy red, charcoal grey with a pink flush, or pale pink and black bi-coloured. I'm wondering whether the seed I've got has been accidentally cross-pollinated with a 'normal' black and white flowered bean, or whether they naturally have that much variation. They were all gorgeous, but I saved seed mainly from the deepest red ones.

In 2006 I grew 12 plants, mainly from my own seeds, but topped up the numbers with two from the original seed packet. I now don't know which ones were originals and which were mine, but I can guess: there were 10 normal deep red-flowered plants and two pink and black oddities. Broad beans do cross very readily so it would be no surprise if an open-pollinated variety like this had picked up a few stray genes from a neighbouring crop. It'll probably do it some good, too. And as long as I select the best red ones for seed each year the variability should soon disappear.

There is another old-ish broad bean with red flowers, Red Epicure ... but it's quite different, larger and with chestnut-brown seeds.

Today in the garden ... potting by moonlight

Just as a break from the veg reviews, I thought I'd post up a couple of pics taken in the garden today.

The top one is a yellow hellebore from a local nursery (it's an "out-take" from one of their breeding projects) and below is a picture of an overwintered Cheltenham Green Top beetroot, looking decidedly bronze-topped but full of healthy new growth.

There's not a lot else out there at the moment, and the garden also looks a horrible mess, because I've done no clearing up at all and the shrivelled remains of last year's crops are still drooping and tangling all over the place. I make no apology for it though, because it gives the birds something to eat through the winter, gives beneficial insects somewhere to overwinter, and when I finally dig it all in it will benefit the soil too. The other reason for it of course is my sluttish approach to garden tidiness. But the advantage of a blog is that I only have to show you pictures of things in close-up so you can't see the muddle all around it.


Talking of muddle, our kitten is now 8 months old and going through a horrible teenage phase (at least I hope it's a phase, or we're in trouble). Like a lot of teenage boys he's fidgety, petulant, smelly, communicates mainly with chimpanzee noises and likes randomly destroying things. This morning I found my husband's iPod earphones in the cat basket along with the usual ripped up tissues and till receipts. He knocked an entire propagator of pea seedlings off a windowsill the other day. Husband was shouting "aaargh, my carpet!" and I was shouting "aaargh, my peas!" Large squidged areas with pawprints have been appearing in seed trays and several chunks have been bitten off a cactus (I found those in the cat basket too). What we really need is a Prisoner-style "orange alert" system, where whatever mischief the kitten is involved in you press a button and a big white weather balloon goes after him and swallows him up. What a lot of running about that would save me.

Anyway, I've been sowing peas today. Yes I know it's a bit early, but I'm experimenting to find out what I can get away with and which varieties best cope with having their butts frozen off. I have one lot of plants out there in the cold frame already, a hardy variety called Alaska, kindly sent to me by Patrick from Bifurcated Carrots, and they seem quite happy so far. Having said that, it is preposterously warm here for the time of year. I'm not organised enough to have a garden thermometer but it was certainly mild enough for me to work outside without a coat and I had the back door open for a good hour or so, which was very pleasant. I didn't get my pea planting finished before nightfall, but it didn't matter ... I was out there on the patio this evening happily stuffing bog-roll tubes with compost by the light of the moon.

Heritage vegetable review Pea: Champion of England

Age: introduced c.1843
Background: bred by William Fairbeard, a nurseryman in Kent, England. It was originally called Fairbeard's Champion of England.
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: tall with long pods, incredibly sweet flavour
Cons: disease resistance not great

I can only partially review this variety this time around ... I had to save most of the crop for seed and didn't get a chance to do a proper taste test. I'll be growing it again this season so hopefully I'll find out more about it.

The first thing I did find out about it is that the seeds are prone to rotting at the germination stage. I only had eleven seeds to start with, and as a matter of policy I try not to plant my whole stock at once, no matter how small the sample, so I just sowed eight. Of those, three germinated and five went mouldy. It may just be that I got unlucky, or was careless with my watering. It's a common problem with peas ... they rot very easily, but still need plenty of moisture to germinate, so getting the balance right can be quite tricky. But it certainly seemed to me that Champion of England was more vulnerable to this than any of the other varieties I grew.

So I sowed a new batch with the three remaining seeds and this time I put loads of perlite into the compost. That seemed to fix the problem OK. A few more seedlings died off after planting out, so I ended up with only three productive plants.

Once it gets going, Champion of England is fairly typical of an old-fashioned gardener's pea. It's very tall, easily reaching 6 or 7 feet, and quite slender and elegant. The leaves have whitish silver markings, as peas often do. The flowers are elegant and a pale creamy white. Then you get long, long pods, green and slightly scimitar shaped with about 8 or 9 average-sized peas in each.


As I was desperate to ensure my future seed supply I avoided eating too many, but I did try a couple of immature pods as raw mangetouts. They were very sweet and yummy. I also tried a couple of pods worth of raw mature peas, and they were very sweet and yummy too. Champion of England has a reputation for exceptionally good flavour and that certainly seemed to be the case.

Unfortunately my plants had a short-ish season before being struck down by a virus. But I certainly liked this variety enough to want to try it again.

Champion of England is a rare variety and not commercially available in the UK at the moment, although ironically it seems readily available in North America. It's over 160 years old and was very popular and well known in its heyday, which lasted until the early 20th century. As was its breeder, William Fairbeard, who ran a nursery in the Kent village of Teynham and was a very well respected pea man of his day, introducing several other commercially successful varieties (not all of which have survived). Charles Darwin wrote to him in 1855 for advice on pollination issues while he was writing Natural Selection.

Heritage vegetable review French bean: Mrs Fortune's

Age: unknown
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: pretty beans and pods, mad yields, long season, trouble free
Cons: none that I noticed

According to the HSL catalogue, this variety has been cared for by Bristol allotmenteers for a number of years, and they got them from a lady called Doris Fortune who loaned part of her garden to a retired head gardener. He had apparently grown these beans in the gardens at Windsor when he worked there. It may or may not originally have been a commercial variety.

Whatever its provenance, Mrs Fortune's climbing bean is notable for its pale green pods with mottled blue streaks, and its dried beans which are an intriguing pale buff colour with whorls of deep maroon-blue. And also for its generosity: the plants grow to at least 6 or 7 feet tall and would probably keep going given a chance, and the yields are mad.

As a garden plant, Mrs Fortune's is not much of a looker, poor dear. Her leaves are quite tidy and symmetrical and slightly raspy like a cat's tongue, with a slightly anaemic pale green colour, and growth is rampant and sprawling. Flower buds are green with a half-arsed splosh of mauve. Not really one for the ornamental borders. More strangely, the whole plant sags at night. It just goes all floppy and the leaves droop. Every single evening, whatever the weather, like it's tucking itself in for the night. And it interprets 'night' very loosely and starts to look like a stack of discarded hankies by tea time on a summer's afternoon.

But things start to pick up from the flowering stage onwards. The flowers are two-tone pink when they open, fading to mauve, and are quite pretty. Then come the pods, which are bright green and fairly wide and flat with a little curly tail. Around the time the beans start to swell the pods develop a blue streaky pattern. The blue becomes very dense and dark on pods exposed to direct sunlight, while the hordes tucked away inside the foliage only develop a shadow of it. I should point out that the foliage is so voluptuous there's no possibility of any sunlight getting through it.


You have a choice with French beans: you can eat the whole pods while they're young, or you can let them mature and shell out the beans to eat fresh, or you can shell them out and dry them. Mrs Fortune's is useful for all three. The pods are palatable and stringless when they're small, and only start to get fibrous when the beans inside have reached a fair size. There's no shortage of pods though, so you can eat them at whatever size you like. When cooked they keep their bright green colour (but not, alas, the blue streaks) and are firm and juicy. Not, however, the best I've ever tasted ... just a little bit on the bland side, with a very slightly fuzzy texture on the pod surface.

My personal favourite way to use them is to wait until the beans have reached something near full size, then quickly shell them out and chuck them in a pan of boiling water for 5 or 10 minutes for immediate guzzling, with butter. Shelling them is a bit laborious because the pods are still very fleshy and succulent at this stage, but it's worth it. Texture and flavour are wonderful. The beans are greenish white and rounded like a haricot. If left until fully mature, the blue streaks turn maroon ... while beautiful maroon splodges appear on the seed coat inside, which darken to a purple-blue when dried. The greenish white dries to a nice warm tan colour. This may be the way Mrs Fortune's climbing bean is bred to be eaten, as a soup bean for adding novelty and substance to gloomy winter stews.


Anyway, it's the most vigorous, robust, rampant, dependable, high-yielding bean I've grown so far. No bother at all from pests. It survived storms and cold weather and stayed productive well into the autumn. It's not a first choice for fresh pod flavour but it has so much else going for it it's really well worth growing.

Heritage vegetable review Runner bean: Black Magic

Age: pre-1970
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: beans are large and go through beautiful colour changes
Cons: string! string! string!

Black Magic is a macho runner bean. The pods are easily capable of growing over a foot long, the beans are massive and a hard glossy black when dried. But if you want to eat them as conventional runner beans you have to get in there quick and harvest them while the pods are very small. Otherwise you'll be chomping on a mouthful of green gristle. To say that the pods are stringy is an understatement.

Personally I don't think the flavour is anything special either. The pod flesh is juicy and succulent but coarse in texture and taste. I was not impressed.

Inside the pods the beans start off green and turn deep pink as they start to swell, and then go a gorgeous midnight blue before maturing to jet black. It's only by shelling them that these colour changes can be appreciated, but they are very, very beautiful. The dried black beans are a delight to look at and handle.

In the end I gave up trying to eat the pods and just used this variety for shelling out. It may not be the conventional way to eat runners, but I found that leaving the beans to reach a mature size and discarding the stringy old pods is the most rewarding way to use it. The beans have a texture very similar to butter (lima) beans ... they're substantial and delicious to eat. You can eat them while they're still small and pink or leave them to the midnight blue stage. As is so often the case though, the colour doesn't survive the cooking process. On contact with boiling water the beans turn an inky mauve regardless of what colour they were to start with.


In the garden the plants were moderately attractive, having some red veining in the leaves and stems, and nice orangey-red flowers. But the usual runner bean glut never materialised. I probably didn't grow mine in the most advantageous position, but even so, the yields were very low. Mine also performed poorly in flower production, although pod set was good on the few flowers it did produce.

So on the whole I was disappointed with Black Magic. It has size and looks but the pod flavour doesn't match up to it. And although it certainly has merit as a shelling bean, the primary purpose of runner beans is eating the whole pods and it's no fun to find yourself chewing what feels like a mouthful of wire wool. It might appeal to exhibitors who are looking to grow enormously long pods but not necessarily to eat them.

It may not be fair to judge its lacklustre performance this season because I know several other bloggers (and my neighbour) had problems with their runner beans in 2006, so the poor yields may not be anything to do with the variety. I might be inclined to give it another go just to see, but probably not just yet ... I think there are other better varieties out there.

Heritage vegetable review Potato: Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy

Age: unknown but estimated around 1899
Background: apparently maintained single-handedly by a shepherd, William Little, for over 50 years. He acquired it at a horse fair in the 1940s and it's probably local to the Yetholm area in the Scottish Borders.
My supplier: home-saved tubers; microplants originally from Organic Gardening Catalogue
(NB The Organic Catalogue no longer lists this variety, but it's available direct from Alan Romans.)
Pros: unique and gorgeous three-colour skin, pretty flowers, excellent flavour, retains much colour after cooking
Cons: flesh darkens a little on cooking

There is a reason why you probably won't have seen any seed tubers of this variety for sale anywhere. It's illegal to sell seed potatoes of unregistered varieties in Europe, so obscure heritage spuds like this one never get a look in. The solution, ingeniously devised by Alan Romans (author of that little green booklet about potatoes you see in garden centres) is to sell them as ready-started plants. Or microplants to be precise, laboratory propagated and certified virus free. As I've said elsewhere on the blog, I have a few issues with microplants: they're expensive, too precious to survive without special care and it takes at least two seasons to get a full yield. But they have enabled Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy and a whole host of other rare and interesting old varieties to get out there into people's gardens and not just languish in gene banks, and for that I'm very grateful.

This potato really stands out by anyone's standards. Originating (it seems) from an area of Scotland rich in faery and Arthurian legends and a stronghold of Scottish gypsies for centuries, it has a unique colour combination of velvet purple, hot pink and cream, all swirled about in streaks and blotches like the surface of the planet Jupiter. Some tubers feature a Jupiter-style spot or eye in their pattern. When they're freshly dug and newly scrubbed up they really are breathtakingly beautiful.

Whether the variety originated in the gypsy community or whether it was bred by a local gardener, it was acquired by the Mr Little whose name it bears at a local horse fair, and he grew it for the next half century. Towards the end of his life he passed a tuber to Alan Romans whose subsequent efforts have ensured its future survival and (through his microplants project) availability to gardeners.

So ... it's taken me two seasons to get from tiddly little microplant to abundant crops of super-coloured potatoes, but it was flippin' well worth it.

One characteristic of Yetholm Gypsy is that it's slow to chit (sprout). But that can be an advantage, because it means you can leave tubers sprouting right through the summer and sow them in successive batches to extend the season. I don't actually know whether this is supposed to be a maincrop or a second early or what ... it seems to grow happily and yield well whenever I plant it. Yields are possibly slightly lower than a modern variety but not much, and the tubers are on the small side with some variation in shape, and occasional knobbly bits.

The leaves are smallish and dark green and the plants are very lanky. I mean very lanky. They grow bolt upright for a certain while and look very handsome, and then they flop over and grow leggily in all directions. So it isn't the tidiest of potatoes. But it does have very pretty mauve flowers, which if you're lucky will blossom before the rest of the foliage splats gracelessly over the floor.


The colouring in the tubers appears to be created by a thin layer of purple-blue pigment over a thin layer of pinky red pigment over creamy white flesh. Some of the streaks develop in the soil as the tuber grows. They are mostly dark blue when first harvested, and when you wash them a little of the dark blue rubs off and gives you more streaks of red and white. Then as the potato dries the colour seems to set and become permanent. It really is a most distinctive and unusual thing.

I was fully expecting the flavour to be insipid though. When you find something this wacky you can't really expect it to have a knock-out taste as well. But ... this is a very special potato and it tastes fantastic. Under its thickish skin the texture is on the waxy side and very moist, and the flavour strong, sweet and earthy. And as if that wasn't enough, it retains its colour after cooking! That's right, you can tuck into a blotchy purple red and white jacket potato and it tastes as fantastic as it looks. The colours do fade to brown if baked or roasted for long periods, but in most circumstances it keeps enough colour to make an impression on the dinner plate. It's good for boiling too, although the flesh tends to darken slightly and take on a greenish tint, which is less aesthetically pleasing.

I had read that Yetholm Gypsy has poor resistance to blight, and that nearly put me off trying it. However my crops were trouble free and even the final late summer batch was unblighted right up to the end of September, despite the stricken tomatoes keeling over all around it.

Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy has become my joint favourite potato (along with the modern variety Marfona). I love it.

Heritage vegetable review Tomato: Black Plum

Age: not sure
Background: originally from Russia (Moscow)
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: very vigorous plants, solid fleshy fruits, high yield
Cons: needs plenty of support, flavour not exciting

First up, I think there may be two different varieties of tomato called Black Plum. I've seen them described in some online catalogues as small or cherry-sized. The ones I've got are a good full size plum and quite chunky and I don't think they're the same, although they may be strains of the same cultivar.

The word 'black' when applied to tomatoes can refer to anything from russety-red to smokey purple, though never actually black. In the case of Black Plum it's really more of a muted chestnut red with green flambéed shoulders. The insides are a dull greyish red and incredibly fleshy. The fruits form bell-shaped plums, blocky at the top and rounded at the bottom, which are dense and heavy and stay firm to the touch until fully ripe. You certainly get plenty of substance from them and plenty of dark juice and slippy gel in the middle. The flesh is succulent with a slightly grainy texture. Flavour is mild and sweet with a black tomato muskiness.

My own preference is for acidic tomatoes, so I must confess Black Plum in its raw state is not to my tastes at all. I also found the graininess a bit of a turn off. But if you like sweeties and don't mind the mealy texture then you might find it more tasty than I did. I mostly used it for cooking, which it seems readily suitable for and imparts a slightly dusky hue to sauces. Because of its thick flesh and mild flavour it's good at adding substance and big tomatoey chunks to a dish but there's no corresponding zingy taste.


In the garden Black Plum plants are extremely vigorous and voluptuous, and it's essential to give them adequate support bearing in mind that they produce a multitude of solid, heavy fruits. The plants are dark green and hairy and reach at least five feet tall with rampant side-branching and abundant flowers ... they are larger and heavier than any tomato varieties I've grown before. The fruits grow in very orderly clusters of about six or eight. Trusses have thick stalks with very pronounced 'knee-joints', and the calyx has long upward curling sepals. Flowers are also large and produce copious amounts of pollen even on cool days, so fruit set is not a problem. The fruits swell quickly but seem to take a while to ripen, and once picked their keeping qualities are not great.

In terms of pollination issues, the anther cone is quite open at the tip and the pistil is flush with it, so I would think there's some risk of cross-pollination with other tomatoes. If you're saving the seeds and want to keep the variety pure you may want to isolate it from other tomatoes by a few feet at least.

My plants succumbed to blight, as did all my tomatoes, but it was one of the last to be affected and the disease took a while to really get a hold. On the whole it's a robust and trouble free plant and the yields are very generous.