Tomatoes

In our new series of articles, we will be introducing you to the diversity of our vegetable seedling assortments. We are kicking off with OpenSky® fruit vegetables – a selection of particularly robust varieties that are just as impressive in home gardens as they are in professional sales. A glance at the sales figures at lubera.com shows that almost every second vegetable plant sold belongs to the fruit vegetable group – no wonder, as it includes popular vegetables such as...

Do you only know us as specialists in softfruit young  plants? Then we have a surprise for you. Because Lubera Edibles stands – as the name suggests – for everything that is delicious to eat. And that no longer includes just fruit and berries. With our innovative assortment of vegetable young plants, we are taking the next logical step – surprising, diverse and perfectly tailored to the home garden.

Lubera.com, the online store of our sister company, has been selling premium vegetable plants for several years. These are grown in 1.3-litre square pots, packaged with care and then reliably shipped to customers. The price for most plants is currently around EUR 5.50, with a price increase of 10% planned for 2025. But how big is this market? What are Lubera's experiences in general? We are not initially discussing which companies could produce these young plants and where they are sold, we...

Tomatoes are a good example of how breeding vegetable varieties for the garden works. Breeding is actually easy, but it takes a lot of perseverance and above all continuity until you can finally bring a variety onto the market after six to ten years. In the following, I will briefly explain what is involved in our outdoor tomato breeding programme and how we specifically bred the Happy Black® variety.

How can you, I thought. But Markus " Merciless" Kobelt didn't let up: Yes, exactly, to invest 1-2 days with a photo shoot in the hottest August of all times (?) on the current breeding fields in Buchs, that was his latest job to me. Now I do like to take photos. But I prefer slightly overcast skies - of course just so that the photos turn out as good as possible, certainly not because of me... But what did I notice during the photo safari, armed with the camera and with the eyes of...

For some years now, when breeding new tomato varieties, we have concentrated on outdoor tomatoes that are largely resistant to blight and Alternaria. In discussions, we have heard time and again that the resistance argument is not important regarding tomatoes, that customers would focus on taste, on compact growth types or on diversity (colours, shapes, stripes). Sometimes even the suspicion was expressed that the building of tomato roofs, tomato houses and the like was just part of growing...

In recent years, the Lubera® breeding programmes have also been steadily expanded in the direction of vegetables. The first breeding programme is now bearing fruit, literally. We are pleased to present our Open Sky® outdoor tomatoes. Our Open Sky® tomatoes are designed to simplify cultivation in the home garden. By strictly selecting the healthiest plants, we have developed varieties that can be grown in the garden without further weather protection in Central Europe and they are also...

Tomatoes and aubergine young plants from Lubera Edibles®. We can already see the incredulous amazement in the eyes of many of our customers. And that's why we start early enough to explain what we do at Lubera Edibles vegetable-wise. Because one thing is certain: plant producers as well as young plant producers will have to position themselves more broadly and pragmatically in the future in order to resist the distortions of the market.

When you travel, everything that's different often stands out. The traveller's gaze is – so to speak, the other way round. And it is shaped by what he/she has known for a long time. The traveller sees the difference and learns from it. In this respect, travel is really educating. In this short travel report I try to record some impressions concerning plants and the plant market that I noticed during a two-week trip I took to the United States in July. I have no claim to...