A fantastic tasting high-lycopene paste tomato. Veepro has a sweet, rich flavour with the right balance of tang.
As far as we know Veepro is the only high-lycopene (‘og’) paste tomato on the market. * See below for info on ‘og’ tomatoes.
Veepro’s beautiful deep red tomatoes (40 g to 80 g/1.5 oz to 3 oz) have thick walls, which are perfect for sauce making and salsa. They are also great for fresh eating.
Fruits mature early to mid-season. The compact (2 ft) plants are easy to care for and productive.
We will point out that open-pollinated high-lycopene tomatoes, like Veepro, are rare. Almost nobody (maybe nobody?) is breeding open pollinated high-lycopene tomatoes today, rather they are breeding expensive F1 varieties. Which makes these Canadian bred tomatoes pretty special.
A bit of history:
Veepro was released in 1977 by Dr Ernie Kerr, a master tomato breeder at the Horticultural Experiment Station in Simcoe, Ontario. The station was part of the public vegetable breeding program of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
Veepro’s parentage includes High Crimson, the og tomato that was the backbone of the Canadian high-lycopene breeding program. Its full ancestry is: Romavf/3/H1350/4/High Crimson//ST 8/Florida 1339D3.
Kerr & Cook (1981) report that Veepro has excellent cold germination ability and is resistant to fusarium wilt.
Thank you Dr Kerr for making these amazing tomatoes available to home gardeners!
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*What is an ‘og’ tomato? ‘Og’ stands for ‘Old Gold’ which refers to the ‘og’ gene that these tomatoes have. Tomatoes that have the ‘og’ gene have 25% to 75% more lycopene than standard red tomatoes. Lycopene is an important antioxidant that has cardio-vascular, anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties, to name a few of its benefits. In the 1950s, Canadian researchers isolated the ‘og’ gene in a tomato from the Philippines and developed several tomatoes using the ‘og’ gene. These tomatoes were developed using traditional breeding methods.
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How to Plant: Start seeds indoors 6-8 weeks before the last frost. Plant seed 5mm (¼ inch) deep. Keep moist. When true leaves appear, transplant to a larger container if needed. Transplant outside after the danger of frost has passed/later spring.
