Endurance

Endurance is a very hardy bush tomato that produces a good yield of red slicing / salad tomatoes late into the season.

The medium-sized fruits have a juicy, firm texture with pleasant mild tomato flavours.

The variety was developed as a blight resistant tomato that reliably can be grown outdoors in the UK and Ireland. It is an excellent choice for outdoor beds but can also be grown in a greenhouse.

It has a semi-determinate habit and can be grown as a classic bush type or stringed up as a climbing type. If you grow it as a bush we recommend using a support cage to keep fruits off the ground. If you choose to string it up we recommend removing some side shoots (suckers) to reduce the sprawl.

Additional Information
The tomato was originally developed by Simon Crawford in the Seed-Coop (UK) as a hardy open pollinated variety carrying the Ph2 and Ph3 gene sequences known to offer strong protection against blight.

However, the Seed-Coop could not finish the project (i.e. they didn’t make a final selection among candidate successions and multiply the seeds). This was instead done by the Seed Sovereignty and the Gaia Foundation as a participatory breeding project in 2024-2025 .

As members of the Seed Sovereignty network we were delighted to be part of the project and it was interesting to see Endurance thriving in participants’ gardens in all corners of Ireland and UK. In 2025 we picked the last tomatoes from our outdoor beds in November. Other members in Mayo and Donegal reported the same and it really is a hardy variety.

Many good blight resistant varieties are in practical terms controlled by large seed companies by making their varieties F1 hybrids which are not suited for seed saving. Endurance is a stable open pollinated tomato which makes the Ph2 and Ph3 blight resistance more available in the open domain.

We give a small royalty to Seed Sovereignty for each sold seed package which supports other breeding projects in the Seed Sovereignty network.