Marion tomato

Of all my new tomatoes, this year (2019), I'm most impressed with Marion, currently. It had good, clean germination, and a high germination rate. The plant has good vigor. It set fruit early, and the fruits are a good size. The first fruit ripened by 25 July 2019 (it's been a slow-ripening year; not all my previously grown early tomatoes have had ripe fruit, yet). The first fruit to ripen was the largest on the plant, interestingly. I saved seeds and ate the fruit. It tasted excellent! It has what I think is a Brandywine-type taste, but better than that sounds to me. Another taster really liked the taste, too. The texture was good, and the walls were pretty thick. Here are some pictures of it.

I definitely want to grow multiple Marion tomato plants next year. I'm thinking my lineup may include at least Marion, Sausage, Sweet Orange Cherry, Mountain Princess, my Brandy Boy cross, my Gnocchia di Limone cross, Galapagos Island, and some others.








Offsite articles:
• Bonnie Plants
• Cucurbit Breeding at NC State
• Dave's Garden
• Rutgers University
• Tatiana's TOMATObase

Offsite threads:
• http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=18569
• http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=40564

Vendors:
• The Home Depot
• MIgardener
• My Patriot Supply
• Pase Seeds
• Piedmont Farm and Garden Supply
• Reimer Seeds
• SeedsNow
• Sustainable Seed Company
• Totally Tomatoes
• Urban Farmer (ufseeds.com)

heirloom_tomato

These two Marion tomatoes lacked what I call the Brandywine-type taste, but they were still my favorite tomatoes I tasted this day. They were quite sweet. The splotchy one had thick skin, however, and the one with zippering had sort of thick skin. The one with zippering had five locules.

I think the splotches are the result of a disease trying to infect the tomato (and the tomato may have delayed ripening in those spots, and thickened the skin to help combat it, too). That's a hypothesis, anyhow! :) Marion was next to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem had some mild disease symptoms. Too bad I didn't zap Jerusalem's seeds first! Oh well, I'm excited to see how Jerusalem differs next year, from the seeds I zapped and saved, today.

Here are my Marion tomatoes, so far, this year. I'm growing at least one plant from every fruit I saved seeds from last year, as well as one plant from the original SeedsNow seed packet.

This is from fruit #1 and is currently (as of today or so) the fastest-growing post-transplant tomato in the garden, and one of the two largest:


Here's my store-bought plant, today:


Here are the others (probably from all three fruits; they're all grown from seeds I saved last year):