I grew PP in 2009. It was a healthy plant and set quite a number of fruit. Needless to say, we were looking forward to them. Then -- bam! -- late blight came to town and we had to destroy every single tomato plant, including the luscious-looking (up to that point) PP. Obviously I can't comment on the taste because none of the fruits were close to mature. But it did have a good number of medium-to-large fruits and quite a few blossoms before it went to the great garden in the sky. :-) I keep meaning to try it again, but always get sidetracked by other varieties and PP gets forgotten. Hmmmm, it's not too late this year. Thanks for the reminder!

Are you using those wire cone cages sold in the store? If so you see one of the several reasons why nobody likes them. The wires are not close enough to support the weight of fruit. One thing you can do is take twine and bind the stems closer together so that they can support each other. Or end up doing what many of us do. Put a stake in the pot with the cage and tie off to the stake.

Some background on the variety Julia Child. Gary Ibsen at Tomatofest asked me if I had a great tomato variety that I hadn't distributed seed for that he could name and offer in honor of Julia Child. But he wanted exclusive rights to it. It turns out I did have a great variety at the time, but I don't give exclusive rights to anyone. At the time the variety had been called Perry's Teasum b'c I'd been teasing folks here at GW with how great it was but just couldn't get enough seeds, thanks to the deer, to list in the SSE Yearbook or to distribute here, when I used to do my seed offers here. When I had enough seeds I decided to share with others what goes into naming a variety and started a thread here and gave all the background information I had about the variety and 22 folks posted in that thread and I sent seeds to all of them as a thank you. The name that we came up with was Neves Azorean Red, which indeed has become a very popular variety. I don't know what variety Gary ended up with that he named Julia Child. Carolyn

This is apparently the "original" source of all the known information of Margaret Curtain on the Internet: Margaret Curtain (Koanga Institute, a seed-saving organization in NZ) The Koanga Institute identifies itself as a charity-seed saving organization in New Zealand, active in consulting in organic and permaculture type growing strategies, and that they have collected NZ seeds from gardeners and others over the past 30 years, which would suggest they might have some records of from whom and on what date they got this seed or more explanation on its "well known" fame. They say: "NZ Heritage An outstanding large black tomato that is a well known old cultivar around the East Coast where it has been grown for 100 years or so. It is a low acid beefsteak with outstanding flavour!" It says grown around 100 years on New Zealand's East Coast. Reminds me of Cherokee Purple, that "100 years" seems to pop up when nobody knows anything, or it could be the history of CP erroneously transcribed which makes sense to me. I don't think Auckland is on NZ's East Coast in a political sense. The East Coast zone is horticulturally important in the country. Sorry, but to me this whole description sounds too fantastic at this point, until something substantiating could be found. I don't get the well-known old cultivar part. If it were well-kown, how did it hide all these years from the tomato world. That doesn't seem likely to me. If true, that might make it a like parent of other black tomatoes in the world, but for such a claim, the website reference is unsatisfactory as it stands. One possibility on the name: Margaret Curtain was one of the ~30,000 women in New Zealand over 100 years ago that signed the petition (link, Margaret's original signature is the 27th row up from the bottom row) that year which resulted in New Zealand being the first country in the world granting women's right to vote the same year. Many of female NZ's population signed it and she was just a signatory deep in the document, not a leader in appearance. On the bright side, it is a reasonable census of NZ woman at the time. But this was over 100 years ago. It reminds me of the Paul Robeson black tomato in the commemorative sense somewhat. But the Paul Robeson tomato has a yellow epidermis, and Robeson was a Stalinist and civil rights' activist who took strong leadership and conscientious roles, so the similarities end there unless there is more info available elsewhere. Auckland/East Coast is on the Philippines' side of NZ, but that's a story for another day ... PC