The Benefits of Heirloom Tomatoes?

[Fusion_power]

Heirloom tomatoes are grown for flavor, not sitting in store shelves or riding in trucks. Therefore, they have thinner skins, which in turn, gives much better taste.

Thinner skin does not feel like you have flat plastic strings in your mouth, it is a texture thing.

Heirloom tomatoes have more nutritional benefits. including potassium, niacin, vitamin B6 and folate and the cancer fighting antioxidant lycopene.

While generally correct that heirlooms have nutritional benefits, it is mostly from better cultural and handling practices. Commercial tomatoes are grown with commercial fertilizer, harvested before ripe, shipped, gassed to ripen, then sold tasting like cardboard. Also, lycopene content can be doubled by use of the b^og gene. I grow a lot of open pollinated varieties with high lycopene.

Heirlooms are passed down from season to season, taken by the farmers from the tomato plants that produced the best fruit.

Unfortunately, very few farmers or gardeners actually practice seed selection and breeding. Most buy a few seed, grow a few plants, decide “I like this one” and from that point forward change very little. The result is people like justjohn who never got past betterboy. What he doesn’t know is that Better Boy and Big Boy both share a pink heirloom parent named “Teddy Jones” which gives them a unique and delicious flavor.

As someone mentioned, the seeds can be saved and grown again, whereas most hybrids can not be saved to be grown by farmers, which is one of the most controversial reasons…Large conglomerates like Monsanto and others want to be able to control what you plant, they discourage heirlooms, because they want you to have to buy all your seeds, plants, garden supplies from them. Why would you want to grown tomatoes from the same company that produces Round-Up weed killer ?

Regardless of position re roundup, large companies are only interested in making a profit. Doing so in context means they need to produce seed farmers will plant whether or not consumers like the result. Farmers are paid by the ton for tomatoes. Cracked, damaged, scalded, decayed, split, or virus infected tomatoes are not purchased. Breeders focus on tomatoes that don’t crack (thick skin), don’t get damaged (heavy texture), don’t scald (heavy leaf cover protects from sunscald), don’t decay (fungal resistant to gray mold), don’t split (low turgor pressure), and are resistant to viruses (take that spotted wilt and yellow leaf curl).

Big, Boy, Better Boy, etc…taste ok…until you taste a Cherokee Purple or a Brandywine Heirloom, plus you can grow them again for free…Big Boys, Early Girls, etc…you have to buy from them every year !

Tomatoes are one of the few foods where seed can be saved and will mostly produce as well as the parents. However, hybrids still have a huge production advantage over heirlooms plus hybrids have proven performance in adverse conditions. I love my heirlooms, but they are disease magnets in my climate.

I have done both as a small gardener. I use to buy hybrids mainly for disease resistance, but now that I"m retired, I have more time and enjoy getting my hands in dirt and growing veggies. You learn what works and what doesn’t work. If you pay attention to what you’re doing you can baby the heirlooms along and produce the very best tasting tomatoes ever ! I think the dark tomatoes like Cherokee Purple, Black Sea Man, Black Krim, Chocolate Cherry (all heirlooms) just blows away all the better boys, big boys, big beefs, etc…not even close !

Yes, they blow away in terms of flavor, but there are major reasons, some listed in this post, large commercial growers don’t grow heirlooms.

For comparison, I’ve grown over 3000 heirloom varieties along with a few dozen hybrids over the years. I also am an amateur tomato breeder. If you really like dark tomatoes, try J.D.'s Special C-tex or Bear Creek.