PV, yes it certainly does sound confusing, doesn't it.
But clearly you don't know Joe Bratka as some of us do. While he has bred several well known and liked varieties, such as Isis Candy and Snowwhite and Ghost and Rabbit and Marizol Bratka, nee Purple Brandywine, he also has represented many varieties, such as the whole Sara series, as being family heirlooms when they aren't.
As I recall, and my memory is not perfect, ahem, Velvet Red, which he got from somewhere, preceded the appearance of Angora Super Sweet by two years.
Initially SSE had listed it in the public catalog as Angora Super Sweet, bred by Joe Bratka. For several years I've been asked to do the proofing of those tomato pages, but that year Aaron was running behind and didn't have time to send me the pages for proof.
I ASAP recognized that the blurbs for both Velvet Red and Angora Super Sweet were identical in the SSE Yearbook and shared that with Aaron. So Aaron changed the entry to Velvet Red b'c it preceded the Angora Super Sweet entry by two years.
Yes, I'm remembering now that it was the blurb in the SSE Public catalog that said the fruits were fuzzy, but I've grown it quite a few times and the fruits aren't fuzzy, as grown by me.
Maybe they had Decorah "dust" that landed on the fruits out there. LOL
I hope that clarifies the situation as much as I can. With Joe it's been hard to determine, sometimes, what was his, and what wasn't. But he usually let some of us know which ones he bred and which ones he didn't, and he never said he bred Velvet Red.
He no longer is active in sending varieties to Bill Minkey , who was the only one who ended up listing his varieties, I know I stopped doing it, once Bill found out that the histories on some of them were concocted and not true.
Early on before Joe started getting shall we say creative, I got many wonderful authentic heirlooms from him b'c he used to get many from the seed pages of National Gardening and Orgainc Gardening.
And Eva Purple Ball was for real as was Marizol Gold, but when he then introduced Marizol Pink and Marizol Red and Marizol Purple, a number of us got suspicious.
Joe was very honest with me when he said that he knew there was a large demand for family heirloom types, so he was going to create some, and he did.
Carolyn
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