I never tried Marmande or the hybrid.

However, Pruden's Purple is an heirloom which was very tasty when I grew it last season.

Linda

Lab, I don't believe that OP is looking for good heirloom recommendations although I tend to agree that PP is a decent one.

I also am not familiar with Madame Marmande but when you posted about it I thought about Marbonne, a hybrid cross offered by Joknny's Seeds last year. It is listed by them as a hybrid version of Marmande. I grew a few plants this past year and I can't comment as to any noticable improvement over Marmande. It is cited as having resistance to Fusarium and TOMV. People with history of these diseases might offer more comments. Possibly Madame Mamande is similar in breeding concept.

Thanks for info about Marbonne. I heard of it, but thought the breeding of Mme. Marmande might be better. Your comment will save me from trying Marbonne in the future if Mme. M. does not please me. Hoping someone gives me feedback on it first, though.

I believe the future of tomatoes is in the Heritage Marriage concept: getting the taste of some open-pollinated into healthy, productive hybrids like Brandy Boy and Genuwine.

I have found that open-polinated are only worthwhile to me if they are hierlooms (costoluto genovese, jaune flamme') and Marmande is certainly an hierloom, with a big festival dedicated to it.

Most of my tomatoes are repeats. Only have room for a few new cultivars: probably Mme. Marmande unless I hear a negative report on it, definitely Heritage Marriage Perfect Flame (Jaune Flamme' x Peron), and I was planning to try to graft Cherokee Purple to Big Boy. Territorial says that they have repeatedly selected CP for better production. To try to get a good black, I grew Heritage Marriage Cherokee Carbon (CP x Carbon) last year, but the taste was not equal to CP. So I decided to try the grafting. I can substitute Prudens Purple if it is more productive and more disease resistant than CP. How is it on production and disease?

Prudens Purple was productive for me, and no more subject to disease issues than the rest of my plants. We tend to get Septoria and Early Blight.

I think that the taste of CP is fabulous, but production is low. I grew Indian Stripe RL in the summer and it did pretty well. I will try Indian Stripe PL in 2017.

Of the three blacks that I grew this summer, Indian Stripe tasted best. Dwarf Rosella Purple was second and Margaret Curtain was third.

Linda

Prudens purple was one of my most productive tomato plants as well. I can't say much about disease resistance, except mine are still living and producing. The taste was outstanding. It was super juicy. Many large tomatoes. Here's my biggest one.

How are you defining "heirlooms"?

tarolli: Heirloom means beloved for generations. It can be jewelry, furniture, or tomatoes. It has nothing to do with how it was created or what it is made of.

I wasn't being snarky. There's no real set definition. So I wanted to clarify what you meant. By your definition, for example. Big Boy F1 would be "heirloom" because it has been beloved as a hybrid tomato variety since the 1940s, but most people consider "heirlooms" to be OP because with heirloom plant varieties, unlike jewelry or furniture or something like a bonsai tree, you're not passing down a fixed physical object but rather a genetic lineage.

Also, there is no record of one of the most famous heirlooms, Cherokee Purple, as existing before Craig LeHoullier named and introduced it from seeds he got in 1990 from someone who said they got it from someone who said that they got it from someone who they said claimed it was a 100 year old family heirloom that the family originally got from the Cherokee. So there's a good case that could be made that it might not really be an heirloom by your definition, as there's a lot of reasonable doubt about the Cherokee origins story and difficulty in proving its age and impossibility in proving when it was stabilized as a specific variety. In fact, many varieties called heirlooms are recent discoveries of which the origins aren't really verifiable. (To be clear, I'm perfectly happy calling many of those, including CP, heirlooms, and I'm happy with the existing evidence that CP is probably pretty old, but I certainly don't consider "heirloom" a term that has a fixed meaning and certainly not a scientific one in any way).

PP is a big, indeterminant, plant. Not sure how happy it would be in a pot. Of course that depends on how big the pot is.....

Linda