A RUTABAGA BY ANY OTHER NAME...

If you like rutabagas, you'll love this turnip.

Gold Ball Turnip (aka Robertson's Golden Stone, Orange Globe).

In the spring of 1849, The Stirling Observer, Stirling, Scotland, called Robertson's New Golden Stone "the best Garden Yellow Turnip." By that fall, the Gold Ball turnips were being shown at horticultural exhibitions across the UK. In 1851, a tenant farmer for the Marquess of Beadalbane grew a competition Gold Ball turnip weighing 17 1/2 pounds. By 1854 the cultivar was widely available from seedsmen.

"Robertson's Golden Stone. - This new and excellent variety has only recently come into general field culture. It has a fine globular shape, and is of a deep orange yellow throughout, and has little or no green tinge on the top. It is not a good keeping turnip, but, at the present, it is the best known variety for late sowing."

The Bristol Mirror said yellow turnips were a taste with more general appeal in Scotland and France than in England.

In France, the horticulturalists Vilmorin & Andrieux in their great work Description Des Plantes Potagère (1856) called it Boule D'Or - Gold Ball - and that is the name that has come down to us today.
By 1856, Gold Ball turnips were being exhibited at horticultural expositions in the U.S.

Charlwood & Cummins, the most extensive seed dealers in London sent seed to the U.S. Patent Office for the turnip in 1855, under the name Golden Ball. The U.S. Commissioner of Patents distributed seeds to farmers in every State of the Union to experiment with and report back to the Patent Office of their success. The seeds were to be sown broadcast at the appropriate time for the locale. The land should be a light sandy or gravelly loam, freshly manured, if necessary, with well rotted farmyard dung, or "yarded," by cattle or sheep, or by the addition of guano, bone-dust, or superphosphate of lime. Land newly cleared or burnt over, or old pasture ground ploughed two or three times in the course of the summer, and the latter fertilized by wood ashes, will often produce and excellent yield. A farmer in Assonet, MA who received seed from the Patent Office ranked Gold Ball 13th out of 26 turnip varieties he trialed that year, producing 440 bushels of roots and 6400 pounds of tops per acre.

The seed was soon available from American seedsmen. An ad in The Alexandria Gazette, 03 April 1856 edition read "New and rare seeds, imported direct from Europe by the subscribers, consisting of Robertson's Golden Ball Turnip...received and for sale by Henry Cook & Co."

"Decidedly the finest - formed and richest coloured yellow that appears in the Collection is, however, Robertson's golden stone, a variety introduced in the field practice of the last two or three years, by Mr. Robertson, near Paisley, and extensively made known, in the spring of 1850, by Mr. Fyfe, Editor of the Scottish Agricultural Journal. In garden culture, the golden stone had been distinguished by the remarkable smallness of its tap-root, and the firmness of its neck - the tap-root being, in fact, no thicker than the tail of a mouse. It was, also, remarkably symmetrical, but by no means a large bulb, with an eminently smooth bright orange skin; but in field growth it has been found to expand immensely in size, without parting with its finer characteristics. It seems peculiarly adapted for an autumn or stubble turnip."

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