Reading the various messages regarding the True Black Brandywine; its history and the placement of this tomato variety as a distinct variety characterized uniquely apart from the 'other' Black Brandywine requires one to step back and summarize what is known to date. I have Black Brandywine from different sources, but I don't yet know which 'clone' I have of what likely appears to be two strains? The most recent Black Brandywine I have been using for breeding is from Salt Springs Island in B.C.
Should Jere or William Woys Weaver supply all of the pertinent data about the True Black Brandywine? Perhaps. I will in their absence of supplying documents summarize what I know to date.
True Black Brandywine
1.Bred sometime in the late 1920s by Harold E. Martin
2.Black Brandywine was a controlled cross between Brandywine and the original brown Beefsteak tomato otherwise known as Fejee Improved
3.Fejee Improved is probably extinct
4.If extinct, why are the varieties called Beefsteak today red and not brown?
5.Feejee, it’s also often spelled Fiji or Fejee
Feejee Improved
1.Several other seed catalogs other than Landreths that describe it as maroon not purple or purple-pink
2. Maroon is a fixed Victorian color
3. Maroon is indeed reddish brown, the color of raw steak and that is likely why the tomato got the name Beefsteak
4. Feejee Island (a parent) also known as Lester's Perfected listed as pinkish-red.
5.Beefsteak (Feejee Improved) was a different tomato variety created out of Feejee Island.
6.There is no record of the other parent or if it was a mutation.
7.This cross (mutation) had to have happened before 1869 because the name Beefsteak was given to it by Campbell at that time
8.The commercial release of the variety came much later than its existence among Jersey tomato growers
9. The name Feejee, (1860s and 1870s) was equated with cannibalism.
Tom Wagner
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