Can you tell that I like to talk about tomatoes, even if I don't really have something to say
.
Fireworks is an open-pollinated (altho' not heirloom) variety. PotterWatch will have to tell us what they actually amount to since I haven't grown them. They have been recommended to me by a very good gardener who lives just south of me. He's got some very difficult soil to grow a garden in, to my way of thinking, and an even shorter growing season.
It seems to me that we have to be a little careful with this new interest in heirlooms that has kind of swept the country recently. By some definitions, an heirloom has been handed down within a family. What we might mean with a garden heirloom is that it is a variety well adapted to a specific locality because seed was selected from the plants that did well, over many, many generations.
Some heirlooms may be broadly useful. I grow a tomato that my grandmother grew in Las Cruces, New Mexico during the Depression. It came to me by way of my dad's youngest brother from his garden in the central valley of California. My environment is probably more like Grandmother's in New Mexico but the season is a good deal shorter. Her tomato does just fine here
.
I grow a few hybrids, including Sungold. One thing that many heirlooms do not often have is much disease resistance. Sometimes, the most disease resistant plant is not one that has much value for food. It can be a parent of useful offspring, however.
Also, hybrids tend to be very, very consistent. Heirloom plants may all be in the same "family" but they are like a group of cousins - and some are very distant cousins. Think about your own cousins, and 2nd cousins and shirt-tail cousins . . .
Hybrids may have very few parents and the parental lines are plants that are very closely related. They are like cousins whose parents are identical twins. All the sisters of one family married all the brothers of another, sort of thing.
One open-pollinated tomato variety with special disease resistance is Legend. Legend is NOT an heirloom, altho' I find it listed in that group in some seed catalogs (I also find it listed as a hybrid
, it isn't that either). Legend is a modern tomato maybe something like Fireworks.
The "legend" behind Legend is James Baggett, of Oregon State University. He's also the guy who gave us the Oregon Sugar Pod pea. Legend has blight resistance and is very early, very productive, and it is a small plant with big tomatoes. A lot of gardeners would appreciate these qualities. Legend is a very mild-flavored tomato.
Tastes vary but so do tomatoes
. It is a wonderful annual fruit and can be very sweet or very tart or very flavorful or not.
I probably eat most of my tomatoes in the garden - walking around, looking at them. That's the way it should be, don't you think
? But, most of the beefsteaks come in the house because the quail like to eat them if they ripen in the garden. After a day or two on the counter, I slice them, lay them out on a plate often with cucumber chips, splash apple cider vinegar over all, and sprinkle with black pepper. Along with some nicely cooked and buttered snap beans and corn on the cob - well, that's about the best part of being a gardener!
Steve
edited to say, I may be overstating the heirloom variability thing but, apparently, some are more like gene pools than even breeds. Horticulturalists also use the term: landraces.
