Tomato Mountain Magic (F1 Hybrid)

A large cherry, blight resistant red F1 Hybrid tomato on indeterminate plants.

Description

Mountain Magic is a “Blight Resistant” F1 Hybrid. Developed by North Carolina State University it has resistance to both Early and Late Blight.

It is a “large cherry” (about 1 – 1.5 inches) and crops well.

We have grown Mountain Magic in 2016 as part of our attempt to grow tomatoes at our allotment outside. Late Blight is endemic at our allotment site and any tomatoes grown outdoors for the last 10 years (in 2016) have usually suffered from late blight (it seems a little strange that we would keep trying tomatoes, but there have been a couple or three years when we have not had blight and that kept us trying.

In 2016, we grew Crimson Crush, Mountain Magic and a few heritage varieties. All of the Heritage varieties failed to late blight quite early but both Crimson Crush and Mountain Magic, whilst they had blight on some fruit, carried on growing through the blight and produced a crop.

Neither Crimson Crush nor Mountain Magic produced any ripe fruit before we were forced to pick the green crop in late October when frosts were becoming a threat. We sorted out the fruit that looked like they were infected with blight (about 20% of the Crimson Crush fruit but none of the Mountain Magic) and brought them back to ripen indoors. By late November about 80% of the fruit had ripened.

Their taste was nothing special. However, this is probably unfair as the comparative fruit were all ripened on the vine and the Crimson Crush/Mountain Magic were ripened off the vine which probably doesn’t allow them to properly develop their flavour.

https://horticulture.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/programs/tomato/releases/release-notices/release-Mountain-Magic.pdf

2017 Update: As well as growing the F1 seeds left over from 2016, we also sowed some F2 seeds collected from the allotment plants in 2016. We have two distinct varieties. A potato leafed variety and a regular leafed variety. The assumption is that these represent the parent tomatoes in some way. Looking in more detail at the parentage from these links:

http://fshs.org/proceedings-o/2005-v…18/376-378.pdf
https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle/1840.16/1041

its still difficult to work out what the parents of Mountain Magic are (and therefore which has what sort of blight resistance).

To be honest, in our experience, the “Blight Resistant” cultivars are not worth it (as yet) and, as blight is basically carried on the wind and damp, our best advice if you have blight in your area, is to grow tomatoes indoors as far away from potatoes as possible and then to carry out all blight prevention measures which include: Keeping the doors and windows closed as much as possible; visiting your tomatoes before you do anything else; separating anything you use in the greenhouse (secateurs for example) from those used outside; trusting to luck.

2020 Update: I’ve tried again to grow the F2 from Mountain Magic. Again I’ve ended up with a regular leafed version and a potato leafed version. I’m growing them both in the greenhouse to compare one against the other. The potato leafed version has been one of the first to set fruit (27th May) so, it will be interesting to see how it compares to other early cultivars.
The Potato Leafed Mountain Magic F2 is the first tomato to start changing colour (2nd July) with a standard sized fruit on the first truss changing and ripe (ready to pick I think) on the 7th July). The fruit are much larger than in 2018. At the end of the season, I had a problem. Throughout the year we had an issue with what I eventually decided was Bacterial Canker (it seemed to give all of the signs of wilt so I’ve really no idea what it was) however, the first plant to fall foul was the regular leafed Mountain Magic and it gradually spread throughout all the indoor tomatoes. It didn’t affect the fruit and the plants survived but my concern is whether the seed was infected or whether it came from somewhere else.