New
For 2022!
Belle Rouge(
$7.95
)
75 days
One Sunday morning in 2014 during an
open house plant sale at my nursery, a handsome young Frenchman waited in
line to chat with me. :) He had been visiting a friend nearby
who told him about us.
When he got to my table he held out
to me a tiny vial of tomato seeds. A perfume sample vial.
This charming traveler from Le Mans,
in Northwestern France, where the Oceanic Belt influence creates
fragrant
tomatoes with
complex, layered flavors, had been given the seeds by his aunt. She grew
them in one of the huge community gardens for which Le Mans is famous (along
with auto production and motor racing).
He could not remember what type of
fruit it was, just that it was magnifique! And as yet unnamed.
The vial was so tiny, I misplaced it
for years. Adrienne finally found it this spring wedged at the bottom of a
harvest basket which had been on the table all those years ago.
We were thrilled to grow out this
mystery seed and find out what it was! We planted the seeds, Adrienne called
it 'Perfume Sample". I made 'Perfume Sample' labels for the plants we grew
out.
To our delight, those magical seeds
produced the most beautiful, full flavored tomatoes starting out a pale,
delicate orange, then ripening to deepest red, 'rouge' in French, meaty,
heavy with juice,
shaped like bells and double-bell
hearts, 6-8 ounce fruits.
And the flavor is, yes, magnifique!
In Adrienne's photo you can see one of the 'double' fruits.
So beautiful! With out-of-this-world
flavors, heavy in the hand, complex, layered and fragrant. So I named this
French beauty Belle Rouge.
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