Our tomato field gave us a surprise on Monday. Generally speaking, our harvests of many crops are bigger on Monday than they are the rest of the week as the fruits and vegetables have an extra day to ripen or grow over the weekend. But after an extremely hot July, we had been expecting a bit of a crash in our heirloom tomato numbers.
Generally speaking, true heirlooms tomatoes are less resilient to pests, diseases and the weather than most modern varieties. As we get later into tomato season, we reduce the amounts that we plant and shift towards hardier hybrid varieties. But over the last several years, plant breeders have been developing “improved heirlooms”, crossing the old favorites with more vigorous varieties. We’ve been trying them out, and finding some good ones that seem better adapted to our late summer conditions. Those “hybrid heirlooms” were what we found ourselves harvesting in larger amounts on Monday.
The single biggest defect with heirloom tomatoes is that can’t handle the heat. The plants themselves get stressed and weak. And they fail to set fruit when it is too hot because the flowers fall off the plants. I discussed this in a past newletter. Some of these new “heirloom hybrids” seem to have overcome this problem. It’s not a bumper crop, but the plants have a nice amount of fruit.
Two other big problems with true heirlooms are cracking and irregular shaping, both of which tend to lead to lots of tomatoes being discarded. Another problem is that the fruit of some otherwise great varieties can simply be too big — no one really wants a two and a half pound tomato. The hybrid heirlooms we grew this year mostly have little or no cracking, and nice shape. And they are a nice size: big enough to look like heirlooms but not so big that one slice covers a whole plate.
At this point, we’ve got Pink, Purple, Yellow, Gold and Bi-color Yellow/Red varieties that seem to be performing very nicely. There are only small amounts of each in our August tomato field, so you won’t see all or even very many of them in your own box. Next year we’ll try them again to see if this year was just a fluke, or if the results are consistent.
In the past, we rarely had heirloom tomatoes in your boxes beyond August 15th despite our overall season lasting into October most years. But these new types offer the promise of “fall heirlooms” in the future. Enjoy.