Ahhh, tomato season. I started just a tad late in the season, so my little babies are just now starting to produce fruit. This is history, folks! The very first tomato I’ve grown. I’ll mostly likely not eat this one, but save its wonderful seeds for planting next year. This tomato is called a Green Zebra. When it matures it will have green stripes and I’ve been told it is sweet, yet spicy and zingy.
What is with these plants with funny names? They’re heirlooms. I didn’t know anything about heirloom plants until a month or so ago-and I certainly didn’t realize the importance of them. An heirloom plant is an open-pollinated cultivar that was commonly grown during earlier times but is no longer used in today’s large-scale agribusiness. Open-pollinated means that a particular plant can be grown from seed and will come back “true to type,” with the next generation looking just like the present one. If you plant an heirloom tomato like a Brandywine, for example, then collect the seeds from the mature plant and process them properly, the plants from these seeds will grow and produce exactly like the Brandywine tomatoes they were taken from. You cannot do this with hybrid tomato varieties because they do not have the ability to reproduce themselves. Plants are generally considered heirlooms when they can be traced back 50 years or more, although most agree that heirloom fruits and vegetables are unique plant varieties which are genetically distinct from the commercial varieties popularized by industrial agriculture.
But why should we grown heirloom plants? Taste for one. American vegetables have no personality. Take a look at the tomato. They are made to ship easily, resist disease, ripen at predicable times and look exactly the way consumers have demanded them to look (perfectly round and red). This ends up making them tasteless and mealy. For 23 years and 4 months I thought I hated tomatoes. Until I had my first heirloom (and consequently in season) tomato. Growing plants to be uniform, resist disease and to travel easily leads me to the next reason. By doing this we loose all the different varieties of that specific plant. Have you ever heard of a Moon and Start watermelon? A Sweet Chocolate pepper? How about Georgian Crystal garlic, Collective Farm Woman melons, Bhutanese red rice or Kellogg’s Breakfast tomatoes? Yea, me neither-until recently. Unfortunately many varieties of heirloom plants have been lost forever. Almost 96% of the commercial vegetable varieties available in 1903 are now extinct.
A passage from Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”:
You can’t save the whales by eating the whales, but paradoxically, you CAN help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They’re kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they’ll be able to sell them The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out places where heirloom varieties are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations…
I’ll stop my rambling for now, but if you’d like to read more you can check out this article from Food and Wine magazine.
I’m off the the Beaches Green Market to visit my favorite farm stand: Twinn Bridges
