Quick Summary of Hazel Mae
- 🌍 Origin: A well-known American heirloom originating from Ohio. Prized for its massive bi-color fruits.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). Needs a long, warm season to perform well. In regions with short or cool summers, yields can be disappointingly low unless seeds are started very early indoors.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, flattened (oblate) bi-color beefsteaks. The exterior is yellow-orange with pink/red blushing, especially on the blossom end. They frequently reach 400-500 g (14-18 oz). Growers often report that the fruits contain very few, if any, seeds.
- 👅 Flavor: The main reason to grow it! The flavor is exceptional—sweet, buttery/meaty, and complex with exotic, non-traditional tomato notes. Even when yields are low, growers keep planting it just for the taste.
- ⏳ Maturity: Late season. It is often one of the last to ripen in the garden.
Seeds from V.D. Popenko. Indeterminate, grew in a glass greenhouse. The yield turned out low for me, but the taste was frea-king a-ma-zing 😋👍, buttery and sweet, but not bland. For some reason, my fruits were not large—yellow plum-like shapes with a pink blossom end. I will definitely try growing it again just for its amazing taste 👍.
My Hazel Mae (USA)
Lyubushka sent me the seeds, thank you very much. The yield wasn’t very high, but I sowed it late. They are still growing and ripening now; I should have sown it earlier.
My scale has a tare button, I zeroed out the plate… otherwise you guys will say the weight is wrong 🙂
And this is on the bush.
Season 2015:
The variety didn’t impress me. Grown to 2 stems, it was one of the last to ripen. It produced 5 nice-looking large tomatoes weighing 400-500 g (14-18 oz) each. One of them had blossom end rot (?!). The taste is good, but nothing remarkable.
Tatiana said:
The variety didn’t impress me… The taste is good, but nothing remarkable.
For me, this variety also turned out to be mediocre (middle-of-the-road). Perhaps it needs a lot of heat, and the summer was very cold. The variety Gold Medal looks very similar to Hazel Mae, but its yield was much higher and the taste was a solid 5 out of 5.
Season 2016
Since Hazel Mae turned out to be late previously and not all fruits managed to ripen on the bush, this year I sowed a few seeds in a cup on January 25th. I planted them out in the second decade of April.
They turned into excellent “flat beauties” (oblates), differing in shape from other bi-colors. It started to ripen in early July (I added the photo on July 8, but took it a few days earlier). Very tasty, beautiful. Because of the early planting, the yield turned out to be quite good. I will definitely plant a couple of bushes again.
There was zero yield from this variety this year 😄 Only 2 tomatoes on the first truss and that was it 😲 And the fruits were kind of plain-looking.
But when I tasted it, my eyes popped out 😳 It is unrealistically delicious, the taste is unusual, not exactly tomatoey, but somewhat exotic 😋 And the most frustrating part is that there wasn’t a single seed in either of the fruits.
