Quick Summary of Tegucigalpa
- 🌍 Origin: A globally known heirloom variety named after the capital city of Honduras. Highly valued by seed savers for its incredible reliability.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), but with a very slender, elegant (wispy) vine structure. Because the plant isn’t overly bushy, growers successfully prune it to 4-5 stems to maximize yield. It is extremely cold-hardy, bearing fruit right up until the autumn frosts, even when grown outdoors in open ground.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Red, elongated “icicle” or cigar-shaped paste tomatoes. They typically measure 8-12 cm (3.1-4.7 inches) in length and weigh 60-100 g (2.1-3.5 oz). The flesh is dense, thick-walled, with no hollow voids inside. A huge plus: the skin does not crack.
- 👅 Flavor & Culinary Use: An ultimate processing tomato. They are the perfect size for fitting into canning jars whole. Because they are meaty—neither dry nor watery—they are absolutely ideal for making sun-dried tomatoes. Growers also note they taste surprisingly good fresh.
- ⏳ Yield & Adaptability: Mid-season. It has a legendary reputation for being an unstoppable producer. As Russian gardeners say, it “spits and sets” (meaning it sets fruit effortlessly and continuously, ignoring bad weather).
Tegucigalpa – indeterminate, mid-season ripening.
The fruits weigh about 60-100 g (2.1-3.5 oz), red. For canning. Dense, without hollow voids, not dry, but not watery either. Can be used for sun-drying.
A gorgeous variety for preserving! I grow it every year; it is ideal for pickling/canning (the size perfectly fits a jar and the skin doesn’t crack), for sun-drying, and by the way, it’s quite good just to eat fresh too! It is one of those varieties that sets fruit effortlessly (as we say, it just “spits and sets”) even outdoors in open ground (I feel bad wasting greenhouse space on it since it does so well outside!).
The fruits are red, long icicles 8-12 cm (3.1-4.7 in), quite dense, no voids, the walls are thick. The bush is slender, you can grow it in 4-5 stems. The yield is excellent (in the photo), and it bears fruit right up until the frosts.
