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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Heirloom Tomatoes
  • Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 14:08:04 -0700


Heirloom Tomatoes
http://www.heirlooms.org/tomato.html
By Bill Best Fall 1998 Appalachian Heritage
(reprinted with permission)

Around the middle of September this year, I went to North Carolina to visit
with a first cousin I hadn't seen in forty-four years who was coming in
from Idaho where he has lived since his retirement from the Air Force. We
met at a convenient place for both of us--the farmers' market in Asheville.
Despite our long time apart, we instantly recognized each other and
set about reliving times past on the Liner Creek part of the UpperCrabtree
community in Haywood County, North Carolina, in the forties and fifties.
First we discussed our Grandmother Sanford, who, we agreed, was a
cook and gardener beyond compare. She was also an early riser, getting up
early to go out to awaken the roosters so that they might crow to awaken
everyone else.
Standing amidst the colorful and aromatic displays of fruits,
vegetables, and canned and dried foods, we then talked about the gardening
we had grown up with and how it had influenced our eating and work habits.
Then, when it came time for him and his wife to leave to go visit other
relatives, he informed me that they were moving back to North Carolina from
Idaho and that his goal, at age seventy-one, was to become a vendor at the
farmers' market to continue his life-long love of working with vegetables.
Our talk brought back to me the dependence we had on one another
growing up and the necessity of having good gardens to put food on the
table. For us, as families whose only livelihood was subsistence farming
supplemented by a little hunting, trapping, and ginseng digging, gardening
was not merely a hobby. Good gardens ensured eating well until the next
ones started yielding the following year. Our conversation also brought
back to me some of my personal experiences as a child and the role
vegetables played for me. Mother always took me, as the oldest child, with
her to work the gardens and to pick wild nuts and berries which we also
depended on. I became expert at picking cherries and climbed with her all
over the mountains to pick the finest wild blackberries. However, my
personal favorite work with fruits and vegetables was with tomatoes. I took
special care with them.
In addition to having tomatoes at least two meals daily during the
summer, when school started in the fall, I took tomato sandwiches to school
until those I had stored away finally gave out and I then started eating
the lunches prepared by the cooks at school. But I was so fond of tomato
sandwiches (with mayonnaise) that I took them for my lunch even if no light
bread was available and I had to take them on biscuits instead. In fact,
after the last tomatoes were gone, for about two weeks I took mayonnaise
sandwiches instead and imagined myself eating tomato sandwiches. My most
memorable year as a child was when we didn't have a killing frost until
after Thanksgiving and I dug ripe tomatoes from a freshly fallen snow for
Thanksgiving dinner. Such was, and continues to be, my love of tomatoes.
I have gardened almost all of my life since Grandpa Best began
teaching me the differences between young sweet potato and cocklebur plants
when I was two years old. Beans and tomatoes have always been my favorite
vegetables, but having paid tribute to beans in this magazine (Winter 1998)
I turn now to tomatoes.
From my earliest memory we grew both heirloom and commercial (seed
catalogue) tomatoes. Of course, we didn't call them heirlooms.
They were just tomatoes of different colors and stripes and I never
gave the varieties a second thought. I liked all of them and thought I was
eating the best food available. (Science may prove me right, since tomatoes
have been shown not to have many negatives and to have many positives with
respect to health.)
When I started my own serious gardens in the early sixties, I simply
went with the seeds and plants available for purchase at the local farm
stores. It didn't occur to me that they might be considerably different
from most of what I had grown up with and genetically altered for purposes
other than making them more nutritious and tastier.
My first discovery was that tomatoes were getting tougher and
tougher and had a lot less taste than those of my youth. I thought that I
wasn't so old that my taste buds were already giving out on me and
discovered that other acquaintances were also having trouble with modern
tomatoes. They, too, thought that something had happened to tomatoes that
rendered them less tasty.
Then I had an experience that began to alleviate my naivete'. I had
a surplus one summer in the early sixties, owing to my habit of always
planting about ten times what my family needed, and contacted a grocery
company about selling my own supply. I took a sample to the company
representative in Lexington, Kentucky, and he was quite pleased. He said I
had a very good looking tomato and one he would like to sell.
So my young children, wife, and I picked the first ripe clusters of
tomatoes, took photos of them because they looked so good, and then hauled
them to Lexington to the company shipping warehouse. Once there, I began to
lose the previously mentioned naivete'. The company representative rejected
them angrily. He said they were ripe and he didn't want ripe tomatoes. He
then went on to say that he wanted them green and that he would "gas" them
to ripen them whenever he needed them. He seemed to think I was stupid
because I wasn't aware that this was the standard way of marketing tomatoes
in grocery stores. But this was an astounding revelation to me and put many
missing pieces into the puzzle about why tomatoes were so tough and had
lost their taste.
When our children were a little older, we started growing tomatoes
for Cumberland Farm Products, a cooperative in Monticello, Kentucky,
operated by Larry Snell, a Berea graduate who had been a monitor for my
wife, the dormitory director of Blue Ridge Hall, while a student. For him
we grew the Campbell 1327 tomato, which had been bred by the Campbell Soup
Company for processing. It had a wonderful acid taste and was very popular
with consumers. We sold them at the "breaker" stage, which is when the star
first appears on the blossom end of the tomato. A tomato at this breaker
stage is already ripe on the inside and needs only a few days to ripen
completely and is promoted commercially as "vine" ripe.
Gradually, however, the Campbell 1327, because of the
characteristics which made it very tasty, became less acceptable to produce
managers and the co-op started going to harder and harder tomatoes, which
had the magic ingredient for marketing to the major chains--"shelf life".
But before I stopped growing the 1327 variety, I had a considerable
surplus of ripe tomatoes and decided to take them to Austin, Indiana, to a
canning factory. I called ahead and was told they would pay me $57.00 per
ton for my tomatoes, and since I would have several tons, I decided it
would be worth the experience. So I hired a large truck and driver and
several individuals to help pick the load.
After we had completed picking, we arrived several hours later at
the plant and were again graded for quality. To my surprise, since these
were the poorest quality tomatoes I had had all summer, I received a very
high quality grade and was told that my grade was the highest ever given at
that particular plant or by that grader. When I observed the other tomatoes
being brought in I understood why my grade had been so high. Most had large
rotten spots in them which were washed out by a high pressure hose while
the tomatoes went down the assembly line and were literally beaten into a
pulp by the high pressure water stream. The experience changed my attitude
forever about canned tomatoes and ketchup and made me appreciate all the
more what I was doing.
I was not very happy about growing the harder tomatoes, but
something else happened that moved us out of growing tomatoes for the co-op
at all. On July 4, 1984, we had a devastating hailstorm and flood that made
our crop unmarketable commercially through USDA channels. I then had to
more aggressively market the tomatoes at the Berea and Lexington farmers'
markets and discovered that tomatoes that were totally unacceptable to a
USDA grader were in high demand by the public.
We were charter members of both the Lexington farmers' market (1972)
and the Berea market (1973), and focused primarily on selling heirloom
tomatoes at both places since most customers at both places had had enough
of hard tomatoes. In fact, many people refused to buy a round tomato
because they thought it would be of inferior quality like those in the
grocery stores and they had come to associate roundness with bad tastes and
textures.
Over the years shoppers who were buying our tomatoes at the
Lexington market started suggesting to chefs at restaurants they patronized
that they should check into our types of tomatoes.
Gradually they did so which then led us more completely back to the
tomatoes I had grown up with. When chefs began to experiment with our
tomatoes in their dishes, their customers started demanding the tomatoes we
were growing and chefs started getting to the markets early to get their
pick of our offerings. To make a long story short and to attest to the
growing popularity of heirloom tomatoes, we currently sell to at least
thirty restaurants, seventeen in Cincinnati and over a dozen in Lexington
and Berea. The tomatoes going to Cincinnati are marketed through a broker
who comes to the Lexington market to pick them up for the chefs in his
area. He also shows up early to get the pick of the crop and has even come
to our fields to pick them himself if we are unable to meet him in
Lexington.
Thus with tomatoes I underwent a transformation similar to what I
underwent with beans but did not go wholly back to growing heirlooms. Among
the 168 varieties I grew this summer, I still produced some commercial
tomatoes but am careful about those I choose to grow and will discontinue
growing those which do not have good flavor and texture. Not to my
surprise, at least not anymore, I have noticed that those which win the
national prizes as "All American" tomatoes are not necessarily the best or
even good at all. What wins prizes is having the right political
connections, with tomatoes just as much as in political races.

Types and Varieties:
Without going into a long detailed discussion about the technical
aspects of tomato types, I will detail some of the major differences among
various types and varieties of tomatoes.
Most people think that there are only two types of tomatoes, red and
yellow. In fact, a large proportion of people in the United States have
only had experiences with red tomatoes and never saw a yellow tomato until
they started going to farmers' markets, either in Berea or in Lexington or
elsewhere. However, there are a multitude of colors of tomatoes and a vast
array of flavors.
It is my understanding that scientists have identified at least
thirty flavor components present in tomatoes to a greater or lesser degree.
Commercial tomatoes, usually picked green and ripened with ethylene gas
days or weeks later, have very little flavor at all and have come to be
used in dishes only to add color. Most people know they have no taste and
expect none. However, vine-ripened tomatoes have a multitude of flavors,
ranging from very acid to very sweet with many degrees in between.
All tomatoes have acid flavorings but some have a higher level of
sugars than do others. As a rule, red tomatoes are more acid than others,
while yellow tomatoes have the highest proportions of sugars. Pink, purple,
black, white, brown, orange, and green (when ripe) have varying acid to
sugar balances, with the yellow German varieties (yellow with red stripes)
being the sweetest of all and in high demand among those who have
experienced eating them. We have noticed that an increasingly larger
percentage of farmers' market customers are purchasing the blacks, browns,
purples, whites, striped, green (when ripe), oranges, and yellows. These
tomatoes have a wide range of flavors and textures.

Sizes: Tomatoes vary in size from the tiny South American currant (both red
and yellow) tomatoes where several will fit into a teaspoon to the
Delicious variety, which holds many state records for size and the world
record as well. It commonly weighs over three pounds and has come close to
eight pounds which is the world record. Without any effort out of the
ordinary, I have personally grown many over four pounds and one
five-pounder.

Colors: As mentioned earlier, many people who have had limited experience
with tomatoes think that tomatoes only come in one color-red. Others will
allow that there are two colors-red and yellow. To the surprise of many, if
not most people, tomatoes come in a multitude of colors with red being the
most common in this country. Other colors are pink, brown, black, orange,
purple, white, green (even when ripe), and various striped varieties with
the red-striped Yellow German variety being the most common striped tomato.
And all of the above colors come in varying hues.

Shapes: Most people think that tomatoes arrived on the earth in the
familiar round shape. They are then surprised to discover that they are
oblong, flat with ribs, heart shaped (the oxheart types from many
countries), ruffled, pepper like (and hollow just like peppers), and many
combinations of shapes. While most plant breeders have tried to make them
rounder and rounder and more uniform in shape, other breeders have tried to
make them square so that they will fit into boxes more easily. Suffice to
say, most large heirloom varieties do not come in uniform shapes and sizes,
which is one of the reasons they do not ship well.

Textures: As tomatoes sold commercially have had to travel greater and
greater distances, and with most now being grown in Mexico, California, and
Florida, plant breeders have bred them to be harder and harder. Commercial
varieties, most of which are picked green, then transported, then left in
storage for days or weeks, and finally gassed to color them, are the
hardest of all. On the other hand, the green (when ripe), black, brown,
purple, and white varieties are the softest of all and will not tolerate
being shipped when ripe. With them it is best to leave them on a flat
surface stacked only one level high and then eat them within three days of
picking. People who care the most about tomato flavor tend to like the
softer varieties and know just when to serve them, based more on how they
feel to the touch rather than how they look to the eye.

Flavors: A lot of customers want a tomato that "bites them back when they
bite it"-or, in other words, a very acid tomato. Most are disappointed with
commercial varieties because their flavor is so bland, but that is the
characteristic of any tomato picked green and then later gassed for
ripening. Their flavors never develop.
All tomatoes ripened on the vine have a substantial amount of acid,
but they vary greatly in the proportion of sugars. As a general rule, red
tomatoes are the most acid of the various colors while yellows are the most
sweet. The pinks, blacks, browns, purples, greens, whites and striped all
have varying acid/ sugar combinations with the Yellow German tomatoes
(yellow with red stripes) being the most sweet of all I know about. Flavor
scientists have isolated over thirty flavor components of tomatoes and
there are probably many more.
Also it is not safe to say that one variety is necessarily more acid
than another variety. The flavors change as the season progresses from
early summer to fall with most varieties becoming more acid as the season
progresses. I am not sure of all the reasons this is so, but it is probably
a combination of shorter days, cooler nights, and the general loss of
foliage to disease and weathering as the season progresses. A diminished
amount of total leaf surface means less space for the production of sugars.
At any rate, those who wish to can tomatoes and have a high acid content in
the finished product would be wise to can from about the middle of August
onward.

Diseases and Environmental Disorders:
Tomatoes are subject to a host of diseases, including fungal
blights, wilts, and bacterial infections, especially during cool rainy
weather. Additionally, they are subject to disorders such as blossom end
rot caused by too much rain or too little rain, both of which interfere
with proper calcium metabolism and produce a leathery black scar on the
blossom end of the tomato. Another metabolic disorder is gray wall, caused
by too much water at certain times during fruit development and causes the
cells in the walls of the tomato to break down. This darkens the walls of
the fruit and rot soon sets in.
The worst of all diseases is late blight, which is caused by the
same organism that caused the potato famines in Ireland, which killed
millions and sent millions more to other countries. It can devastate plants
within two or three days to a week; control measures need to be applied
immediately when the disease is first noticed. A better way to approach
late blight is to have a good prevention program going at all times, and
there are several safe sprays which can control it along with early blight
as well. I have had late blight only once and do not wish ever to have it
again.
While the seed companies claim to have included disease resistance
in their breeding programs and we are all familiar with the letters after
the names of varieties in their advertisements indicating resistance to
various diseases, I have found the heirlooms, as a rule, to be more
resistant to diseases than the hybrids. This is probably why they have
lasted long enough to become heirlooms. People tend not to hold on to
varieties that are plagued by disease while, at the same time, saving their
seeds from healthy plants.
Dealing with these diseases and disorders is a long article in
itself, but I will say that some excellent publications offer suggestions
about disease control and the prevention of blossom end rot and gray wall.
Extension agents in most counties will have them on hand, usually for free.

Varieties: I have personally grown over three hundred varieties over
the past thirty-five years and usually grow over 150 per year now. I can do
this easily enough because I grow almost all of my own transplants from
seed. (I usually order a few hundred from commercial growers in case I lose
my first setting to a late frost.) Rather than list all of the tomatoes I
have grown in their respective categories, I will offer some commentary
about groups of varieties and single out special varieties and types that
have unique characteristics:
For eating, my personal favorites are the pink varieties, which tend
to have a good balance of acids and sugars and pleasant textures. Of the
pinks, I then tend to prefer the oxheart types which are oblong and heart
shaped. Of the oxhearts, my favorite is the Anna Russian which is said to
have come from Russia to a lady in Oregon and then spread to other states
from there. I do know that the Russian immigrants now living in Lexington
recognize them readily and buy them whenever I have them.
As indicated earlier, the Yellow German varieties, variously known
as Yellow German, Pineapple, Big Rainbow, Georgia Streak, Hillbilly,
Kentucky Beefsteak, and others are the sweetest of the large varieties and
are becoming increasingly popular. These are the large yellow tomatoes with
the red stripes which become more pronounced at the tomato ripens. We tend
to double our production each year and are nowhere near to being able to
supply demand as it seems to increase faster than we are able to increase
our supply The Yellow German is supposed to be a Mennonite and Amish
heirloom, and I suspect that the other names by which it is known are
simply local variations and, in some cases, marketing strategies by the
various companies that now supply heirlooms to an increasingly larger
number of customers. Of these strains of the Yellow German variety, I
prefer one I got from Rockcastle County, Kentucky, which is locally known
as the Willard Wynn variety, after the man who perfected the strain. This
particular strain is never completely round and comes in a pleasing variety
of shapes and rarely has cat faces.
The red varieties are best known to people in the United States and
are the varieties most worked with by plant breeders. (Other than Lemon Boy
and Golden Boy, there are no large yellow tomato hybrids that I know
about.) Red tomatoes range in size from tiny red currants where it takes
many to make an ounce, to the Delicious mentioned earlier, which can weigh
many pounds.
In addition to all of the heirloom red varieties, we also grow some
of the hybrids first to be developed such as Big Boy and Better Boy and
more recently developed large hybrids such as Goliath and Park's Whopper.
Most of the red hybrids bred for gardeners are quite tasty with good
texture; the most recent ones such as Whopper and Goliath are particularly
appealing. The Harris Seed Company's Ramapo is also an outstanding tomato
requested by many farmers' market customers, but it has been phased out by
the company, because of low overall demand. When I heard it was to be no
more, I called the company and begged for their remaining packets and was
sent several with thirty seeds each, which will last me for a few more
years.
Some mention also needs to be made of the varieties constantly being
developed by the major seed companies. The primary considerations for most
new varieties are USDA grade percentage and shelf life. There are so many
new ones that most do not yet have a name and exist only by numbers. Few
will make the grade commercially and will disappear. Most are determinate
varieties to be picked green and later gassed for coloration and have
little or no flavor.
However, there is at least one notable exception to an otherwise
dismal rule. The tomatoes developed by Dr. Randy Gardner at the Fletcher
Experiment Station in Fletcher, North Carolina, are held in high regard
both by commercial growers and by gardeners. They are called by the
"Mountain Series" and have names like Mountain Pride, Mountain Gold,
Mountain Delight, Mountain Fresh, Mountain Spring, Mountain Supreme, and
Mountain Belie. Mountain Pride and Mountain Fresh, in particular, are
beautiful tomatoes which also have an excellent flavor. However, despite
the popularity of his tomatoes, Dr. Gardner's varieties have failed to win
the national awards. I believe this is primarily because he is a modest man
working in a mountain county in a Southern state. Yet his seeds are sold by
virtually all of the major seed companies.

An Heirloom Paradox
For many years I have been growing some outstanding heirloom tomatoes
credited to the Amish and Mennonites. They include what we call the German
yellows and pinks and several oxheart and orange types. Since many
communities of both groups have moved to Kentucky during the past twenty
years or so, I have also started buying many of my supplies from Mennonite
merchants in Casey County who supply almost anything needed to grow
tomatoes and other vegetable crops. They have also been responsible for the
development of an outstanding plant setter, which I also bought from them.
Just at the time when I am having the most success in growing and
marketing the Amish and Mennonite heirlooms, I have discovered that both
groups are giving up on their own heirlooms and have started growing the
most modern hard and tasteless types of tomatoes. Ironically enough,
because they are forbidden by their religions to utilize certain forms of
modern transportation and farm machinery, they can't grow their own
tomatoes for shipping and must grow commercial tomatoes in order to have
markets and be able to sustain an otherwise simple way of life.
Having noted this paradox for a number of years, I recently asked
the wife of a Mennonite businessman how they dealt with what I thought
might be a theological sticking point. She then made this statement: "Our
theology is what our leaders say it is on a given day." with a slight
shrug, she indicated that she understood what I meant but also indicated
that they know they must make an accommodation to marketing reality.
Because of their dispersal into rural states such as Kentucky, they no
longer live close to their markets and must ship their produce by
independent truckers long distances to find markets.
I am more than happy to help sustain their heirlooms until the day
comes when they will again be able to grow on their own terms.

The Future of Heirlooms
For many of the reasons delineated in this essay and others too
numerous to discuss, I believe heirloom tomatoes and other heirloom
vegetables and fruits will have an increasingly bright future. Many people
are becoming tired of the same old dreary vegetables and fruits with the
shiny uniform look and the cardboard taste and are looking for flavor and
quality. Agriculture schools are already showing some signs of paying
attention to the needs and desires of consumers, and consumer demand, once
it becomes organized, can change the way America grows and eats. Also,
plant scientists and geneticists are quite concerned about the decline of
plant species and varieties and are giving all the encouragement they can
muster to those of us who are willing to assist in maintaining the
diversity of varieties and species.






  • [Livingontheland] Heirloom Tomatoes, Tradingpost, 02/06/2005

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