Tag Archive for 'high altitude tomato'

A silly heirloom tomato

Reisentraube, a German heirloom variety, claims to be a cherry tomato.  The German-English dictionary translates ‘reisen’ as travel and ‘traube’ as a cluster of grapes… a travelling cluster of grapes.  But in our garden it’s not like a cherry or grape; it’s more like a currant.

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The plant is standard tomato size with delicate, lacy foliage…

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but the fruit are absurdly small. 

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I pulled this onion for scale: it’s a medium-sized onion, and you can see that these Reisentraube tomatoes are less than 1/3 of an inch across.  If I put them in a salad, they’d drop to the bottom like BBs.  They’d make a decorative topping on a quiche, or on little tarts.   

Maybe the Reisentraube grows differently somewhere else, but here it’s a very silly tomato.