Tomato Red Buffalo Horn

Red elongated plum shaped open pollinated tomato on indeterminate plants.

Description

Elongated late ripening plum tomato trusses of four or five fruit of about 5-6 ounces. Really meaty and good for cooking and salads.

This variety seems to appear from nowhere at the Heritage Seed Library where it was “acquired by chance” from Provence. Other than that it doesn’t seem to exist on the web so could well be a (mis)named other variety (after all there are several cultivars that have a similar shape).

In our opinion, its a cooking tomato as there is very little juice in the tomato, its also got very few seeds in the fruit.

We grew it for the first time in 2017 and it had a reasonable crop but was one of the last to ripen (even after most of the beefsteak tomatoes).

Would we grow it again? I don’t know, it really has only one use (cooking) unlike the beefsteak varieties which can be cooked or eaten raw so the answer is probably that its near the bottom of the list.

One of our readers responded about this cultivar:

My 97 year old father has grown these for many years (starting back in the 1980/90’s) having gotten the seeds through as he remembers The Henry Doubleday Research Association (although when he contacted them to try and get some fresh seed at a later date they couldn’t trace any record of them). He gave me some seeds back in the early 2000’s and I have grown them most years since. I find them to have a better flavour than many modern varieties. Being a fleshy variety they were particularly liked by our children who didn’t like seeds in their tomatoes.

and I agree that the old cultivars always seem to taste better. The HRDA are now Garden Organic and (if I have an issue with them) it is that seeds seem to come and go (but then I know how hard it is to keep refreshing seeds, some of mine are ten years old and I don’t know if they’ll germinate).