A bit more on Brandywine, Shah, Eiformig Dauer

[nctomatoman]

Last night, after basking in the delight of the Patriots victory and during the Giant/Packers game, I was reading through some of the old Tomato literature that I relocated (cleaning my "office", trying to get more organized!). I came upon the series of Michigan State documents that detailed extensive tomato grow outs that they carried out in the 1880s and 1890s - essentially, they were growing out and comparing all available tomato varieties at that time. A few things that I previously missed caught my eye, around a few varieties that have proven to be controversial.

First, Shah - they reported this in two bulletins, reiterating that it was a "sport" of Mikado that was released for a brief period by Henderson. It was described as a golden yellow version of the Mikado, yet seemed to be unstable, with the seed producing a few plants that apparently reverted. Large fruit, irregular in shape, with the fruit being a golden yellow version of Mikado, potato leaf plant. They had a table that showed average size, and the average size of Shah came in around the average size of Mikado, and significantly more than most of the other varieties. To me, this does add weight to the fact that if we did have Shah truly around today, it would look very much like Yellow Brandywine, Aunt Gertie's Gold or Elbe in plant habit, fruit color and fruit size. The listings of Shah being a smaller, yellow/white tomato are erroneous.

Second, Eiformig Dauer - the SSE yearbooks recently describe this as a possible forerunner to Brandywine, and it is described as a medium to small, pink potato leaf tomato. In fact, this variety - and it is also described in the Michigan State bulletin from the 1930s - is a small, oblate, red regular leaf variety that was sent from Germany to the US for testing. What is interesting is that they did a single plant selection from a field of the variety that had much larger, rounder red fruit - this was stabilizied and released as Ignotum (it does not seem to exist for us to try today) - in 1890 they described this as a very promising new red variety - equal to or better than Paragon or Stone. So, again, the yearbook listing seems to be founded upon erroneous research.

Finally - they actually did test Brandywine, as listed and released by Johnson and Stokes, in 1890. It was described as a regular leaf, red variety, and the average size was at 6 ounces, the same as they reported for Stone, Paragon and others. I've also seen the woodcuts of Brandywine from a Burpee catalog around that time. This tends to convince me that Brandywine, as released back then, most closely resembles what we grow as Red Brandywine today. They did not judge it to be a particularly good variety, actually! This also tends to lead me to think that what we grow as the large potato leaf pinks probably did have their origin as the varieties Mikado or Turner's Hybrid - as released in the 1880s by Henderson or Burpee, respectively. the source of Mikado, according to the literature I've seen, was a truck farmer in New Jersey sent it to Henderson.

I also found a bit of information on the origin of the dwarf or tree varieties, but will put that in a separate thread. Ah, the joy of multitasking.....mixing gardening with football on a cold night on one's birthday!