Blight resistant tomatoes?

[Mr Bones]

Update on Mountain Magic.
Blight resistant, the leaves showed definite signs but it didn't spread to the stems or fruit. Fruit is very firm and slow to ripen but it does eventually soften. The toms are ideal for cooking in dishes where you don't want them to turn to mush.
Yields are high.
Flavour is fair but as the season closes in they're becoming sweeter and tastier.
Have been picking from outside plants grown from seed for a couple of months but took the final harvest earlier this week because magpies were eating the toms. I still have two plants with fruit outside taken from armpit cuttings plus cuttings with ripe toms in the greenhouse.

Pro's
High blight resistance
Good yields
Sturdy plant
Taste fair to good
Late harvest lengthens the season

Cons
Slow to ripen, wouldn't be so good in an early frost situation
Price, they're not cheap but armpit cuttings take readily

Would I grow them again?
Yes, I've already ordered the seeds

[Penellype]

Well done for resurrecting this thread, Mr Bones.

Agree with all the above about Mountain Magic, which I have grown for the first time this year. I've grown them in 3 different situations:

1. In my garden soil (3 plants) - the plants are huge and laden with fruit which just keeps coming. The plants look sick, but I think this is fusarium wilt rather than blight, and the tomatoes are getting smaller as the year goes on, but taste sweeter as above.

2. In my garden in quadgrow planters (3 plants in 2 positions) - 2 of these were late planted sideshoots, planted in a fairly shady corner in 18 litre pots. They have produced some fruit but nothing like as much as the ones grown in the soil. The other plant was in a sunnier position in an 11 litre pot. In some ways this was the most interesting of the lot. It grew well next to a Sungold and the fruits were bigger than those in the soil, but by early September neither it nor the Sungold looked well, both being affected by grey mould and tomatoes rotting and falling off before ripening. Both plants succumbed to blight within a week of each other in early October.

3. In my friend's garden soil. Blight is rampant in this garden and I have hardly been able to ripen any tomatoes outdoors in 2 previous years of trying (Sungold, Shirley, Belle and Bajaja). The one experimental plant has 3 main stems which I have tried and failed to support with multiple stakes, canes and a broom handle - they are just too heavy and pull the supports over. I picked about 20 ripe fruit at the weekend without making noticable inroads into the number still green and ripening. Other varieties grown by my friend are brown and blighted, Mountain Magic produces the odd brown tomato but the rest are unaffected, although the leaves are starting to go a bit spotty in places.

Decent sized, firm tomatoes which keep well in store and taste sweet, but without the slightly acid tang that a really good tomato has. Tomatoes do not peel easily even after scalding for a minute in hot water. Huge yields from soil grown plants which probably don't like being confined to containers. Very robust staking required!

A very, very useful source of plenty of cooking/freezing tomatoes, and on my permanent "to grow" list.



The current queue for the freezer, with plenty still outside. Most of these are from the 3 plants near the hotbin.

[Penellype]

Ferline

Grown in 2 situations:

1. In my garden soil (3 plants) - good strong plants, although not as rampant as Mountain Magic (in the same bed). Surprised me by producing beefsteak size tomatoes, about 5 to a truss, resulting in one of the plants collapsing from the weight and breaking the main stem. Later tomatoes are more normal tomato size. 2 of the plants including the broken one succumbed to fusarium wilt, although not before producing plenty of large tomatoes. The 3rd plant, growing up the side of the hotbin, looks healthier than the nearby Mountain Magic despite being next to one that died of fusarium(!). This plant has not produced any of the huge tomatoes, which could be relevant. No sign of blight despite being next to the hotbin which had several doses of heavily blighted potato foliage a couple of months ago. I can't believe that no spores escaped the few inches between the hotbin lid and the tomato leaves.

2. In my friend's garden soil (1 plant) - this plant was decapitated by slugs the night I planted it out and I wrote it off as probably dead. However it recovered, producing 3 sideshoots but was obviously rather smaller and overshadowed by its rampant Mountain Magic neighbour. Seeing the size of the fruit on my plants at home, I gave up on the plant ever having time to produce ripe fruit as it was weeks behind. This was a mistake, as I allowed some of the fruit to trail on the floor (to be fair, I couldn't get at it to do much about it due to MM!). As a result I lost the first truss of fruit to slugs. Astonishingly I have now harvested 2 large ripe fruit from this plant and there are more coming along, although several have gone brown and rotted due to blight. The difference from normal tomatoes seems to be that although individual fruit might get blight, the remainder don't seem to do so. Not as resistant as MM, but still a resounding success, considering the circumstances.

Not content with being the first beefsteak sized tomatoes I have ever managed to ripen outdoors, these are also the nicest tasting big tomatoes I've had. If left to ripen until they start to soften slightly they are comparable to a good Shirley. They have much more depth of flavour than Mountain Magic, with much more to it than just sweetness. A really lovely tomato. Yields are not as high as Mountain Magic (although not bad), and heavy trusses need individual support. Don't expect them to be immune to blight, but they cope better than most with it.

Very, very impressed and on my permanent "to grow" list. Worth a try in the greenhouse with an earlier sowing for an even bigger crop.



The current batch of Ferline about ready to eat. Very few if any of these will end up in the freezer as they are too nice raw!

[maverick451]

Id definately 2nd what Penellype says about the taste of Ferline, a really nice rich aromatic large tomato, I gave some away last year and one lady said it was the best tomato they have ever tasted

Mine didnt actually do that well this year, they seem to be a variety that does better in a cool summer that a hotter dry one, I noticed mine were small this year and suffered alot from blossom end rot, I also noticed that they are the only modern variety I grew that doesnt sulk early season in cold temperatures although they absolutely hate it when I start them off under grow lights.

Definately a good tomato to grow outdoors in this country, that crimson crush and mountain magic

[KevinM67]

Thanks for the updating this thread - and the resulting contributions.

[ecudc]

I tried growing Losetto this year outdoors which was marketed as having good blight resistance.....

Variety: Losetto
Type: red cherry bush
Health: OK until it got blight
Blight resistance: um...no. Foliage and fruit all affected.
Taste: mealy and insipid from the few that turned red before the rest got blight.
Grow again: Never!

[hamamelis]

Someone mentioned Broad Ripple Yellow Currant as a blight resistant variety- I only grew one, which isn't exactly a proper test, but it certainly suffered when I got blight in my greenhouse.

It didn't actually die (unlike two other varieties), and did make a bit of a recovery and ripen fruit later, but it did no better than the plants either side, neither of which are supposed to be in any way blight resistant.

[steve sin]

I have lots of toms on my sun lounger and I did not believe they would get through with the amount of fungus around this year. I stripped off all the leaves and blighted fruit, binned them and left the rest to ripen.

I grew:

harbinger,
alicante (never did much. The plant had purple leaves.)
roma,
chocolate cherry,
money maker,
gardeners delight,
cerise (never got a tom on it.)
clou (meant to be blight resistant???)
red cherry,
black cherry,
rosso, (Tesco double pack.)
amber,
balcony tom,
tiny tim,
garten perle
and Matt's wild cherry.

The 2 plants that are still standing now are matt's wild cherry and balcony tom, although I had to take some leaves off, the stems and fruit seem ok. The balcony toms were planted in a big pot away from all the others. I also sprayed all the plants and toms with sodium bicarbonate.
The best flavoured tom was harbinger! Rosso came 2nd. Biggest let down was clou. (A watery tom that was meant to be blight resistant.) The worst blighted tom was black cherry. I wonder if this was gray mould and not late blight as my neighbours apples and blackcurrants go rotten around September and possibly cause the problem?