Is it an heirloom or a hybrid?

Can you tell one tomato from another just by looking at it?

An heirloom tomato is, well, really, like one of great-grandmother’s antiques.

Being handed down from generation to generation, crossing the eddies of time they traversed, seasoned with family lore and traditions.

Afraid their treasured seeds might be confiscated upon arrival, new immigrants often hid their seeds in the linings of suitcases, under the bands of hats and sewn into the hems of dresses.

Seeds provided living tactual memories of their former lives and insured continued enjoyment of foods from the old country.

An heirloom existed way before the “perfect beauties” we call hybrids did. Now bear in mind for the most part an heirloom is no beauty queen. How it tasted was of more the issue.

Heirlooms are open pollinated, meaning we can save the seeds from year to year.
As long as they don’t get cross-pollinated with another variety.

Gathering seeds from heirlooms produce insures identical plants and fruits to that of the parents.

Many of the heirloom seeds had slowly developed resistance to local diseases and insects, and had gradually become well-adapted to specific climates and soil conditions, another plus of the heirloom.

There are four categories of heirlooms: commercial, family, created and mystery.
Now a hybrid tomato is a horse of a different color, developed for the commercial trade, it must appear almost “perfect,” uniform in size and yield, disease-resistant and it must have shipping endurance.

Sadly, it has a drawback and it is this: Taste was sacrificed somewhere along the way.
Hybrid tomato seeds are unstable, and the seeds produced from a hybrid will most likely not produce a tomato to the selected/produced quality, or even resemble either of its parents.

By the way, the tomato is a great source of vitamins A and C, plus minerals like calcium, iron, manganese and especially potassium.

They also contain lycopene, which is a carotenoid (a pigment involved in photosynthesis) that gives red coloring to tomatoes, pink grapefruit and watermelon.

Red tomatoes contain higher concentrations of lycopene.

Have you ever wondered why some tomatoes are orange or yellow when they are fully ripe? The answer is easy. They don’t have any lycopene. And orange tomatoes contain more Vitamin A in the form of beta-carotene.

And, better yet, some have higher sugar contents than others. And there is almost twice the amount of Vitamin C and beta-carotene in a vine-ripened, home-grown tomato, as in a commercial market tomato that is picked “mature-green” – as the vitamins, like C, and sugars are actually destroyed during off-the-vine ripening. And in my thirst for knowledge and enlightenment I have run across this pearl. Are you one for eating fried green tomatoes? Here’s something from The Vegetable Bible by Christian Teubner: eating unripe green tomatoes should be discouraged, since they contain the alkaloid solanine, which can harm the nervous system, which may cause headaches and other complaints, such as nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and the worst possible case, even unconsciousness and convulsions to the point of respiratory paralysis.

One last pearl, it turns out that a red mulch encourages a tomato plant to put more energy into growing more fruit and less into growing foliage.

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The hardest thing to raise in my garden is my knees.

— Unknown

Nancy Wiersma of Dowagiac writes a weekly column.