Tomato, Franchi select, red pear
An absolute garden champion. Nicely productive, hardy with a long season, the tomatoes were delicious in sandwiches, salads, on spaghetti, had wonderful flavor; so versatile, delicious raw or cooked.
Absolute Champ Last Summer
This was my first time with this tomato and what a wonderful surprise it was. A real champ. A Wow! - Very good taste, Good for sandwiches. salads and for tomato sauce. It was a heavy bearer over a long season. I also grew Sun Gold, New Girl and Sakura all good and each distinctive. The New Girl and Sun Gold lasted the longest with fruit into December! [SF Bay Area]
Best sauce tomato ever
If you want to make the best sauce in the world, then grow this tomato. I will always grow this tomato and please save seed from it should you grow it, too, just in case. I cannot praise it enough and am so happy I tried it - the reviews are what made me give it a try.
My plants have always grown well and produced copious amounts of tomatoes, even last season when there was leaf fungal problems - the tomatoes just shrugged it off.
If big, meaty, juicy, sweet tomatoes are your thing, then you must grow Red Pear.
Underappreciated tomato
This tomato was excellent this year in my garden. A lot of people mistake this for a canning tomato and expect canning tomato taste. However, this is actually a very flavorful fresh-eating slicer that is on the sweet side (although nicely balanced with acid) and tastes similar to oxheart varieties, which are known for great flavor. It just happens to *also* be good for canning because of its meaty structure with few seeds. It did have some problems with blossom end rot this year because of record heat waves and periods of low rain, but that's to be expected with any tomato with an elongated body shape. I'm sure it would be fine in a normal season and if I had taken more care in watering. The plant was vigorous from the beginning and was one of the first to flower and set fruit in my garden. It's also relatively disease-resistant compared to other heirlooms. It continued to set some fruit through the worst heat, then started setting a ton of fruit again as soon as temperatures cooled to normal ranges. Anyone who has been disappointed by the flavor of other ruffled tomato varieties should give this one a try.
lives up to the hype
Purchased this variety based on the other reviews. Harvested the first ripe tomato yesterday. Best large red tomato I've eaten in years. Other family members agreed. Good enough to enter in our community garden tomato-tasting contest! Variety is unusually productive and early to produce.
Most definitely a winner! Please, grow this tomato...
This is an update from a post submitted on the 7th of July, 2015.
Well, this tomato did fantastically this year. The community garden allotment on which it was grown experienced a mild drought that lasted three weeks; none of the plants succumbed. In fact, the vines kept on producing well into October; I just picked our last batch three weeks ago, just before the first killing frost. Judging from the vines' overall health, I'd say that these beauties must have at least some resistance to late blight. (This year was a terrible year for late blight; I lost a whole row of potatoes and another variety of tomato to the pathogen.) The one issue I did encounter was that the plants started to show signs of nitrogen deficiency about mid-August; that was largely due to our poor soil. So, I went ahead and gave each plant a healthy dose of green manure, to which all bounced back within a week.
As the catalog description states, these tomatoes are huge: one fruit out of my garden allotment ended up weighing in at 1.92 pounds! And the flavor...wow! The tomato itself is meaty, and richly aromatic. Whether by itself, in salads, on sandwiches, added to soups, or processed into sauce (which is fantastic), this tomato cannot be beat. I donated the surplus to our local food pantry the day before distribution; the food pantry director told me that they were all gone within thirty minutes of opening!
After my experience this past growing season, and, the food pantry's reaction, I am seriously considering the prospect of only growing this tomato.
Vigorous and Disease Resistance: Definitely a Winner!
I started fifteen of theses tomatoes the first week of April, and as of July 7, they are in full bloom; all of the vines already have no less than two or three fruits! I am pleasantly surprised by the yields thus far: our community garden allotment is on nutrient-poor, sandy soil. The vines themselves do not have a speck of disease on them - knock on wood - and are nearly two and a half feet in height. And the fruits, they are already large!
Unfortunately, I cannot say anything about the flavor yet, as none of the fruits will be ripe for another week. Still, based on its ease of growth, I would highly recommend Red Pear sel. Franchi to both beginners and seasoned gardeners alike.
Two thumbs up to both Seeds from Italy and Franchi Sementi.
Another great one from SOI
A really great, tasty productive tomato with bulk for our heirloom mix. would give it 5 stars but I save that for your San Marzano Redorta! Have had excellent luck with all the tomato varieties we have trailed from SOI (and I'm a commercial grower who uses many seed sources). Thanks for providing these great varieties.
The most awesome taste ever and huge size!
We tried growing these tomatoes for the first time this year. We planted seeds in the house on 4/24 and I was kind of late transplanting them to a newly built greenhouse (6/1). I also planted some outside. Living at 7000 feet elevation is a little more of a challenge for gardening. The plants outside didn't fare as well. But, if I plant them earlier next year, I have more hope for them. However, the ones in the greenhouse were fabulous! Beautiful big tasty tomatoes and they, mixed with some San Marzano I had planted made the best sauce we have ever had. I had a hard time knowing whether I liked one over the other, but the size and meatiness made the Red Pear the winner. I will definitely be planting both again next year. Thankfully, we had enough to do some canning to get us through the winter.
Great for home; not so great for market
As other reviews state, these tomatoes are large, tasty, low in seeds and productive. Downsides? Rather rough and irregular in shape and a bit hard to market (I am a market grower) probably due to unusual and often irregular shape. If growing for home use--go for it! If growing for market, may have a bit of a selling job ahead of you.
