Price's Purple Tomato

90 days, indeterminate - 'Price's Purple', sometimes referred to as "Purple Price," produces lots of oblate, eight ounce to over one pound, purple tomatoes (the same color as 'Cherokee Purple') on tall, rather spindly potato leaf vines. The flavor is rich, delicious, and balanced nicely between sweet and tart.

'Price's Purple' has both an interesting provenance and pedigree. It was sent to Craig LeHoullier from scientist and amateur plant breeder Tad Smith in 1991. Tad descibed how the variety was bred in a 2016 email to Craig. He wrote:

"The story goes back to 1987 when I was a PhD graduate student at Virginia Tech. One of the lab technicians had family in Willis, Virginia and gave me some heirloom tomato seed. It was good, but not much different than the Brandywines. I was taking a plant breeding course at Virginia Tech and decided to do a project with the Pink Potato Leaf tomato from Willis, Virginia. I cross bred it with the first purple or chocolate tomato that was available at the time, called Purple Calabash. It was a dreadful shaped, cat-faced tomato. During the winter months, I did the cross pollination in the lab window of Price Hall at Virginia Tech - hence the name. The F2 seeds were planted in a tomato disease trial at Virginia Tech and I looked through hundreds of plants for the best plant 1 out of 16, that expressed the potato leaf and purplish recessive trait. The fruit was good, but still somewhat rough. In the following years, I crossed this selection with Ozark Pink, a new variety at the time released by the University of Arkansas and repeated the process. The final stabilized tomato variety is 'Price's Purple'. It has a wonderful taste and is remarkably early for a large fruited variety."

'Price's Purple' did exceptionally well during a rather difficult growing season with drastically fluctuating temperatures and unseasonable rain. It was released by the Victory Seed Company to the gardening public for the 2025 season. Each packet contains approximately 20 seeds.