Thai Pink Egg tomatoes are great for the home garden, especially in areas with warm wet Summers. The fruit is about 5 cm long, egg shaped, and ripens from a pearly grey to pink. Cut, the flesh is contrastingly orange, and the flavour is good, not at all acid, so excellent for salads.
I selected this from the seed catalogue for two reasons; it is suited to our climate, and the shape and colour make it ideal for mixed tomato salads.
Growing Thai Pink Egg tomatoes
As the name suggests, Thai Pink Egg is suited to warm, wet summers, like we get here. January here was very wet, with day on day of rain. Tomatoes can be affected by root and leaf diseases in relentlessly wet weather, but another issue is fruit splitting. With a lot of water in the ground the fruit can just get pumped too full with water and burst, which is OK if you pick and serve them, but is no good for storage or sale. Thai Pink Egg are resistant to wet weather diseases and splitting. I still did get a few of the ripe ones split, so they went straight into salads. They still did much better than a beefsteak type I have, which split when still green.
The yield has been very good. They keep coming in a steady stream, and a few plants have been plenty for us and give-aways (combined with the other varieties).
As you probably wouldn’t find specialty varieties as seedlings (unless you live in a gourmet farmer enclave), tomatoes like these are started from seed. Merchants have a bewildering array to choose from. They grow so easily from seed that it pays to plant individual seeds into seed pots or peat pots, then plant out the whole plug when there are a couple of sets of leaves above the seed leaf pair. Here early Spring is a good time to start Thai Pink Eggs.
Thai Pink Egg is a bush type tomato, meaning it can grow without support, but I have supported mine with overhead string to stop them rambling too much. I make double strands horizontally between posts, then I push the longest stems through. This also helps keep the fruit off the ground as the bunches get heavy. Like cherry tomatoes, these happily fruit on the ground, but raising them also makes the easier to find.
It’s not a tomato that handles cooler weather though. I sowed five tomato varieties in Autumn for a Winter crop, but although the Thai Pink Eggs grew well, the fruit didn’t ripen in the garden. Plants in the greenhouse did well, in contrast.
For me a great advantage of growing your own food is that you can choose varieties that you wouldn’t see in the shops. I’d recommend these to anyone who wants a bit of tomato variety.