Seminis releases first purple home garden tomato hybrid
Date:02-28-2019
As home gardeners’ passion for heirloom tomatoes continues to grow, Seminis Vegetable Seeds, Inc. (Seminis) today announced it has released its first purple tomato hybrid for Home Gardeners with a sweet taste and appealing color often found in heirloom varieties. Called “Purple Boy,” this tomato is a high-producing semi-indeterminate variety that packs a lot of flavor into the smaller fruit.
“What makes heirloom tomatoes so appealing are their great taste and unique appearance,” says Adam Marschel, Seminis Marketing Manager. “For its first purple Home Garden tomato offering, Seminis wanted to offer a hybrid with a sweet taste and beautiful color, and Purple Boy delivers. This variety is bred to feature high resistance to Tomato mosaic virus (races 0-2), Fusarium wilt (race 1), Fusarium crown and root rot, and Verticillium wilt (race 1) as well as intermediate resistance to Southern root-knot nematode – diseases which are common in and devastating to home gardens. Purple Boy’s resistance package will help increase the success of a home gardener by reducing the impact of these diseases throughout the growing season, which can help the home gardener be more successful when they grow it.”
To determine the perfect hybrid, nine small-plot third-party university and Seminis heirloom hybrid trials were conducted in Florida, California, and Illinois in 2017-2018. These third-party university trials showed Purple Boy to be the favorite among other heirloom types for flavor and yield potential.
“Through our field trials and direct customer feedback, people have highlighted Purple Boy’s nice texture, sweet taste and good acid balance,” says Dr. Alan Walters, Professor of Vegetable Science and Breeding at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. “In my opinion, Purple Boy is an upgrade to some of the other heirloom varieties offered in your portfolio. It’s an outstanding variety.”
Purple Boy is now available for purchase from Seminis through Seminis distributors. To download images of Purple Boy,
click here. For more information on Seminis’ Purple Boy variety or to learn more about its complete portfolio of tomato varieties, please visit
www.seminis-us.com.
About Seminis Vegetable Seeds
Seminis is committed to providing innovative solutions for every generation to help sustain our growing world. For over 150 years, the Seminis legacy has focused on producing the best vegetable seed varieties for growers to use in farming operations around the world. We are proud to support our grower partners by continuously developing new seed varieties through our global research and development team and specialty breeders, and by providing ongoing agronomic solutions to unique farming challenges. Together with our growers, we are passionate about bringing high-quality, nutritious produce to ensure a balanced plate for our global community. Seminis is represented by the Seminis® and DeRuiter® seed brands. Seminis is a subsidiary of Monsanto Company.
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