A Beginner's Garden: Choose Heirloom Tomato Seeds and Plants

That's easy to say, and fairly easy to do. Just buy some tomato plants and set them out in your garden or in a large pot, right?

The truth is, even if you follow your favorite gardener's tomato-growing advice or a strict organic gardening regimen, the tomatoes in your garden will be just as cardboard as the supermarket varieties if those are the varieties you choose to plant. Most tomato hybrids are created for their market presentation and shipping characteristics, and these are not usually the features you want your home-grown tomatoes to have. Gardeners want luscious, flavorful tomatoes that ripen to perfection on the vine. Today's typical new varieties of tomatoes are genetically manipulated with non-tomato genes and other forms of DNA mutilation. Not exactly what Mother Nature intended.

Heirloom tomatoes are old varieties with pure genetics. Seeds for heirloom tomatoes may also be sold under a category called open-pollinated, or antique varieties. These are the original tomato varieties that were used to make natural crosses and to create hybrids. Tomato blossoms are self-pollinating, so each blossom will grow into a tomato that carries genes identical to the parent plant. The seeds from an heirloom tomato will grow plants that will produce the same variety of tomato. Save the seeds from your best tomatoes to plant next year; you only need to buy heirloom seeds once. (Read instructions for saving tomato seeds here.)

Seed companies carry hundreds of varieties of heirloom tomato seeds. Heirloom Tomatoes is an online source for over 600 varieties of tomatoes. They also provide growing tips and advice, and collections of different tomato seeds that will help you make choices if you are unsure about what to try. TomatoFest is an excellent source for organic seeds, and Heirloom Seeds sells other open-pollinated vegetable seeds as well.

If you prefer buying tomato plants, ask for heirloom varieties at your local greenhouse. Laurel's Heirloom Tomato Plants offers 100 varieties of organically-grown heirloom tomato plants online, shipped throughout the U. S.

Here are my suggestions for some tried and true heirloom varieties that produce well on sturdy plants in most areas of the US: Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Kellogg Breakfast, Mortgage Lifter, Black Krim, Red Pear, Yellow Pear, Green Zebra and Kentucky Beefsteak.

Sources:
Personal Experience
http://www.heirloomtomatoes.bizland.com/
http://www.tomatofest.com/
http://www.heirloomseeds.com/tomatoes.htm
http://heirloomtomatoplants.com/