Description

Tomato Meme de Beauce
Solanum lycopersicum

Pink-red beefsteak tomato. Fleshy and juicy. Perfect for sandwiches. Excellent old-fashioned flavor. Large, very vigorous plant, 1.50 m or more in height. Originally from the Beauce region of Quebec. Indeterminate. 80 days.

Full sun, well drained and rich soil. Sow indoors 8 to 10 weeks before last frost. 5 mm deep. 60 cm between plants.

Germination: 82% in November 2025
Ecological seeds produced at Catherine’s Ornamental Garden.

Note
The Mémé de Beauce tomato has a special history. In 1995, tomato seeds were found between the ceiling boards of an old house in St-Joseph-de-Beauce, Quebec. According to the history of the house, they had probably been there for some sixty years. Of the 300 seeds found, 3 were able to germinate.

Reading the full story of this tomato on the Potagers d’antan website inspired us to put it into production. We urge you to read the article. You’ll meet the people behind this renaissance: Mr. Lessard, the Seeds of Diversity organization, Gérard Parent, Antoine d’Avignon… You’ll also discover many other things on Potagers d’antan, thanks to Michel Richard’s colossal research work over the years on heritage varieties.

The Mémé de Beauce tomato in our gardens
In our gardens, the Mémé has had a rather chaotic history. Seeds were purchased for the first time in 2012. We had to bring them in from Western Canada because they weren’t available in Quebec when we looked for them. But the plants yielded all sorts of things, except beautiful, huge Mémé de Beauce. In 2013, at a Seedy event, we were given new seeds by an enthusiastic curator who was very involved in the Seeds of Diversity organization, which in turn received its seed stock from Antoine D’Avignon in 2003. The source was reliable, the tomatoes big, beautiful and very good, but we didn’t harvest many seeds and our stock ran out quickly. We put it back into production in 2016: good production, germination around 60%, not good enough to sell. By then, seeds were readily available in Quebec. We then more or less abandoned the idea of producing it.

In 2021, Bernard Lavallée, aka Le Nutritionniste Urbain, asked us to produce Mémé de Beauce for his ancestral seed boxes. As our seeds were old and not germinating well already in 2016 and we didn’t have time to do a germination test, we decided to buy a packet again. What a blunder! We sowed the whole envelope, but 4 plants were not Mémé. We gave away a lot of tomatoes that year, but we didn’t harvest any seed because of the risk of cross-breeding with intruder plants, and unfortunately we didn’t honor our contract with Bernard. We tried again in 2023 after hearing several comments suggesting that we weren’t the only ones having ‘bad luck’ with the Mémé. We decided it was safer to sow our old seeds from 2016 than to buy new ones and receive who-knows-what.

New to our catalog in January 2024 is the Mémé de Beauce tomato, after 5 production attempts in 12 years. It’s often complicated to release a new product, but luckily it’s not always as complicated as that!