Tomato Green Giant

Green, beefsteak, open pollinated tomato on indeterminate plants.

Description

One of the Green Beefsteak varieties. However, it doesn’t seem to develop the red colouration of other varieties (such as Aunt Ruby’s German Green) so the colour stays more or less the same from unripe to ripe which makes it a bit more difficult to know when it is fully ripe (but not overripe). The best way is to squeeze the fruit as underripe they are rock hard and when ripe, they have a little give like all ripe tomatoes (try it with other tomatoes that you know when they’re ripe and you’ll understand what we mean).

If you manage to time it right (which as you can guess is not easy) the resulting fruit are sweet and juicy but without too many seeds. Its a little difficult to know what to do with them. The slice well and so are good for sandwiches but (like most green tomatoes) don’t make a particularly attractive sauce when cooked.

They appear to be an accidental development because it was an unexpected potato leafed plant grown in amongst an (unspecified) Regular Leafed green cultivar by Reinhart Kraft in 2004 (hence the Open Pollinated designation).

We grew these (for the one and (so far) only time) in 2014 and didn’t get much of a crop. We may try again when we have space.