Mortgage Lifter**

Our Products: 2010 season Tomato Plants > Old Fashioned Heirlooms

SKU: 1230 / Next Availability Date: 3/1/2010

One of our most popular tomatoes, this old fashioned variety of well-shaped, large fruit has very few seeds and a fantastic meaty interior texture. This one is extremely sweet and delicious in tomato sandwiches. Many are over 2 lbs! 85-90 days

Type of Plant: Heirloom or Open Pollinated

Price: $4.75

Tomatoes are sold out for the season. Please visit us Dec. 1st for preordering for 2010

Product Details

Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter Tomato is a 1940's non-commercial tomato breeding development of a Mr. Marshall Cletis Byles of Logan, West Virginia. Naturally, Byles didn't much appreciate his given name, so he was known locally simply as "Radiator Charlie" as he operated a small auto repair shop at the base of a steep hill that was notorious for making trucks overheat. Naturally he did pretty well for himself by having a regular line of customers in need of radiator repair work due to the hill. M.C. Byles gained an interest in gardening after he began working in the cotton fields of North Carolina at the tender age of four years old to help his family make ends meet. As a result of working hard through his childhood, Mr. Byles had no formal education or actual plant breeding experience, yet he would go on to create a most remarkable variety of tomato that would carry his name.

Sometime during the early 1940's, Radiator Charlie decided that he wanted to develop a very large tomato, so he set about trying to locate the largest tomatoes that he could find. He soon located four varieties of very large tomatoes: German Johnson Pink, Red Beefsteak, an unknown Italian variety and an unknown English variety. From these, he grew ten plants which he cultivated in a very unorthodox, very unique fashion. He planted nine of the plants in a circle and then planted a German Johnson Pink in the center of the circle. Byles then cross pollinated the German Johnson's flowers with pollen from each of the nine plants in the circle and saved seed from the resulting tomatoes. The next year, he planted the seeds and selected the best seedlings. The very best of these again went to the center of a circle, while the remaining were planted in a circle around them. Again, the plants in the middle were hand pollinated with pollen from those in the circle. Byles repeated this process for the next six years until he had created a stable variety that met his needs. After that, he never had another type of tomato on his place. The resulting variety became known as the Radiator Charlie's Tomato and soon established themselves as being very desirable. Every spring, gardeners from as far away as 200 miles came to buy their tomato seedlings from Radiator Charlie, which he sold for one dollar each, which was a substantial amount of money for a tomato plant back then.

Mr. Byles sold so many tomato plants of his new variety over the next five or six years that the profits of his tomato enterprise paid off the $6000 mortgage on his home! After that, the tomato variety became forever known as Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter Tomato! In 1985, Mr. Byles shared some of his seed with the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, who formerly introduced it to the general public. Ever since then, it has been a very desirable tomato variety. MC "Radiator Charlie" Byles died at the ripe old age of 97.

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