PlantFiles: Tomato
Lycopersicon lycopersicum 'Black from Tula'

Great tasting black tomato. A compact plant with good production. Tomatoes are larger than Black Krim but very similar in taste to me. An early producer. I will grow it again this summer.

Planted this for the first time in 2011 from seeds that I had collected and processed in 2010. First time that I have grown or tasted a "black" tomato variety and believe it to be the best tasting tomato I have ever had. Tomatoes averaged about 8 ounces. 2011 production was probably not a good representation as avg temperatures were at least 10% higher than normal and avg rainfall was less than 25% of normal for the months of June, July, and August. It was a struggle keeping all of my garden plants alive through the heat and drought. Just planted seeds inside today using the same batch that I harvested in 2010. Am hoping for a much better garden season this year.

Attractive Black tomato. Not as productive, but its worth growing for the complex taste.

Strong, easy to grow plant. The fruits are a beautiful reddish-brownish-purple and have a wonderful, complex, smokey, slightly salty, wine-y flavor. Cannot recommend highly enough! I will be gifting a lot of these plants this year to friends.

Nice, large Semi-Black tomato. Good taste and a really nice,juicy slicer. Strong plant in an Earth Box with 2 other tomato plants. Average weight about 10 0z, with the one in my photo at 12 oz. My first year with this variety so I don't know how to best handle them, but seems like they may need to be picked a bit early and not stored for very long. Sort of like the few other " black" types I've grown. With this Black from Tula though, at least I'm getting a bunch of them from my one plant, and can let them mostly ripen without their going bad. I will be planting several next year.

walt

Black from Tula is a great tomato. It has all of the wonderful, sweet, spicy flavor of a good black tomato. It is easy to grow and produces abundantly from mid-season on. I will definitely grow this one again.

This tomato was my most productive variety of the fantastic 07/08 growing season. Plants were overloaded with medium sized fruit, a bit smaller than I expected, but very tasty. Unfortunately they are quite prone to splitting and dont keep well once picked.

I cannot say enough about this tomato, out of 30 varieties I grew this year it is indeed my favorite, the flavor is out of this world, sweet and tasty.
I will grow it again next year and I will probably do more than one plant, very prolific for me, the only negative is that I could not call it a "black tomato", it never got past red, but I really don't care because the flavor is soooo good and earlier than other varieties.

This tomato produces a limited amout of fruit for me but the flavor is so complex and intense, I've found it worth the Earth Box space. I've tried several blacks but keep coming back to this one. It's true, there is a lot of cracking so the fruit must be watched closely and picked before they are compromised. This black gets a big thumbs up!

This one got some sort of foliage disease (early blight?) and became defoliated. I had to rip it out in early August. Despite this, it was one of the earliest tomatoes I had last year (early July), and it amazingly managed to produce a fair amount of medium-sized tomatoes before it died. Flavor was absolutely delicious - dark, intense, and sweet. Nice meaty texture. It did not get as black for me as Black Krim, but I think I like the flavor better. Dark green shoulders and green jelly around the seeds. I definitely go back for more of this.

funny looking when sliced, but taste super.

I was lucky to find a couple seedlings at a local nursery and snapped them up immediately.

The production wasn't anything to shout about (only a half dozen per plant), but that's likely due to my northern climate and limited garden space. Any tomato that takes 80-plus days to mature (and they'll take their sweet time around here) won't have much time to produce before frost-kill. And, well... my little garden patch is another story.

It took effort to avoid plucking them prematurely, but, oh! So worth the wait. They were drool-worthy. The sweetness was pervading but mellow, an undertone for a dusky, rich flavor with an acid that, while present, didn't bite at all. A real treat.

Good yields of 3-4", slightly flattened fruits on 3-4' plants.

The fruits are large, deliciously sweet, and the plant is very productive in my garden (easily outperforming Cherokee Purple). I've had some minor problems with sunscald, but no blossom end rot or foliage diseases. The fruits do show quite a bit of concentric cracking at the stem end and the flesh is soft, which makes them more vulnerable to rotting, so these tomatoes need to be picked just as soon as they ripen and consumed promptly - not a problem, given their fantastic taste!

Mine were not as "black" as I expected...maybe I picked it too early? Looks a bit more maroon to me. In any case, the BFT was very delicious. Sweet, juicy and definitely a yummy taste.

This variety consistently does very well for me here in the South -- complex flavor, one of the better darks/blacks in my opinion.