Heirloom Tomatoes

Heirloom tomatoes, the tomatoes of taste and distinction, are reaching a new popularity among gardeners who want flavorful tomatoes to eat fresh from the vine as well as great tomatoes for cooking, canning and freezing. To those who remember the taste of “real” tomatoes, before hybrids were all you could find in the marketplace, heirlooms are quite a prize. The surge in popularity in the marketplace has brought a new appreciation for the open pollinated seeds that are now available from many catalogs. There are many seed saver groups that exchange seeds.

Heirloom tomatoes are plants that have not been altered genetically except by natural selection. No tampering with genes to change plant traits has been done. They are old varieties; many can be traced back 100 years or more. Each year’s new plants come from the seeds of the former year’s fruits.

There are four generally described types of heirloom tomatoes. A commercial open-pollinated plant more than 40 years old (before 1960) is one type of heirloom. A second type is family heirloom, where the seeds have been saved by generations of family gardeners and planted each year. A third type of heirloom tomato is a created one. This is a deliberate cross-pollination between two heirloom varieties or an heirloom and a hybrid that has been grown from resulting seed with identical characteristics appearing for at least 5 generations of plants. The fourth type of heirloom tomato is the “mystery.” It results from accidental natural cross-pollination or some type of mutation, and produces the identical plant characteristics year after year from seed. Mystery types are the way most heirlooms originated, and they illustrate the importance of seed saving.