I was just looking through a tomato list on one of the good seed shops in the UK (maybe the only one here that actually encourages you to save your own seeds!) I am not actually interested in this tomato but I will provide the description here for discussion:
De Colgar (Storage Tomato)
A traditional class of tomato from Spain that is pretty much extinct now, these are nice round orange-pink tomatoes bred for winter storage.They ripen a bit later than the others. The idea is that you pick them at the end of them summer and put them carefully aside in your cool larder (much as you would store apples); with a bit of care they keep until January! We have tried this several times and it really does work.
(Just as with apples, you need a slightly humid but well-ventilated store, with a steady temperature ideally about 8-10 C. But if you donāt get it quite right they still store better than other tomatoes.)
They are very similar to the old french variety āJaune de Flameeā; we think that there probably were versions of this in every country so that there were tomatoes available for winter salads. But with the advent first of bottling, then freezing, and now supermarket-shipped tomatoes from Spain, these are all extinct.
Less juicy than normal tomatoes, with a thick skin, which is why they keep. Vine to 5 feet tall, best grown in a greenhouse or polytunnel.
I thought this was worth pointing out, because most of us probably dislike thicker or tougher skins on tomatoes. I know I personally do. However, many of us are also urban supermarket-frequenting creatures. And so it strikes me that for the sake of sustainability, for those who want to preserve their tomatoes over winter, rather than consuming electricity with freezing or demanding time and resources (and entailing higher vitamin loss?) through ā¦ whatās that calledā¦ bottling/jarring? Rather than all that, why not go the old way and just store them similar to how one would potatoes or apples?
And so, if we find tomatoes which are less juicy and with thicker skins in our landraces, perhaps there is an opportunity there to split them off into a new storage tomato landrace!
Now as for late harvest - I wonder, would it be better to have them take more time to ripen, like the heirloom listed above? Or, would it be better if they are mid-season or whatever, but maybe you just plant them a bit later? I mean, if you had the choice? I am guessing the quicker the better and though youād want them to be ready late, since the purpose is winter storage, maybe if theyāre quicker to do their cycle, you could plant them later than the main crop and have something else in that bed until you need to plant them!