Monkey puzzle

 Blight resistant tomatoes. I grew the Crimson Crush F1 tomato in 2019. This is a relatively new variety that was advertised as the first blight resistant tomato. I was amazed by its vigour and performance.

The tomatoes didn't really taste that great but i never managed to grow tomatoes outdoors here with any real degree of success so just the fact of harvesting red, ripe(ish) tomatoes was amazing.

The following year i found quite a lot of plants that had self-seeded. I had kept seeds of the crimson crush fruit with the idea of dehybridising it as i read about in Carol Deppe's book who writes about Alan Kapuler doing this. But i didn't even need to sow the seeds because i found so many small plants that had self-seeded. Also it's quite possible that i would have just forgotten about it because of lack of time and so many other things on my to-do-list.

I then planted quite a lot of these plants and through my usual neglect 15 or so survived and at the end there was 3 plants left that showed a really good disease resistance. All others were rotting away with blight right next to them and these three ones made fruit.

The great thing also was that the first one to make fruit made a large, orange tomato that tasted better than the crimson crush the year before.

first plant with large, orangy fruit.

the fruit were quite misshapen, but the taste was good and blight resistance was good.

You need to keep in mind that we live in a real wet climate comparable to the irish climate albeit with maybe a bit less rain and slightly warmer temperatures in summer.

So the mere fact of having plants make fruit outside without protection is mind-blowing to me when all other tomato plants just rot away before ever making a single ripe fruit.

The second plant i had made nice round shaped medium sized fruit that ripened later. The taste of the fruit was less good if i remember well. Another thing i also remember is that while the plant was totally surrounded by all sorts of weeds it had no blight or any other disease but when i freed it up and completely weeded it the blight started to appear. Coincidence? I don't know.

fruit of the second plant with matchbox for size. I cut off the lower leaves, weeded all around the plant so the fruit would get direct sunlight and then disease started to appear on the plant but it managed to ripen some fruit of which i kept the seed.

the third plant made curious small fruit with a little tip at the bottom. This plant had very little or even no blight at all. I remember waiting for ages for these fruit to turn red but they just wouldn't ripen so since autumn was slowly turning into winter and i wanted to get seeds that i could sow again i ended up putting a tiny makeshift greenhouse over it using polytunnel plastic and metal arches.

picture taken on the 25th of october. I am still amazed that this plant was still standing there looking so good, but the fruit wasn't ripening so after that i decided to put plastic over it.

picture taken on the 30th of october, the day i put plastic over it to ripen the fruit.

This is what the plant looked like on the 30th of october!!!!, after having spent months of being rained on, resisting wind, morning dew and low, cool temperatures etc..

This is most astonishing to me. So this plant itself was pretty useless as far as its fruit production was concerned. The fruit was fairly small, it didn't produce a lot of fruit and they took literally forever to ripen, but because of its disease resistance and tenacity i kept the seeds. The fruit eventually ripened more or less and i found one tomato that i had put on a shelf inside and forgot about in january and it was still edible (not tasty at all though)

So i saved the seeds of these 3 different strains that showed good disease resistance and i sowed them now this year and i am looking forward to see how they will grow and if there is plants among them that will make tasty tomatoes outdoors for me despite the rain and blight