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Old December 27, 2008   #12
carolyn137
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Location: Upstate NY, zone 4b/5a
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LoreD View Post
It's interesting the only place that you can't get EOE is NZ. Perhaps its called something else there.

LoreD
LoreD, it doesn't surpise me at all that it isn't available in NZ. If I could share with you all the family heirlooms that I've introduced over the last 18 or so years I can tell you that if no one outside of the family had access to them and it was only when I was sent the seeds or rustled them up myself that they became available b'c I listed them in the SSE YEarbook.

Many owners of companies that sell OP tomato varieties are also SSE members and get their starts there. IN addition, each year I'd send the best of my varieties to a few places for trial. And that's the way they got into commerce.

Just to name a few that were family held until I "liberated" them:

Neves Azorean Red
Opalka
Crnkovic Yugoslavian
Sandul Moldovan
Gogosha
Box Car Wille
Mule Team
Great Divide
Red Barn
Amish Salad
Heidi
Kiev
Olena Ukrainian
Omar's Lebanese
Large Pink Bulgarian
Soldacki

.......and many more.

So if the sheep farmer in NZ had not shared seeds with anyone outside the family, which is true of all the ones I listed above, that variety may not have been available.

However, one can't rule out that seeds might have been shared but known by a different name, as you pointed out, since it wasn't called Earl of Edgecombe until named so in England.

I have several friends in NZ as well as Australia, and I don't remember them speaking of a variety that looked and tasted like EOE and indeed when it was legal to send seeds from the US to Australia, many of those folks loved EOE.
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