Like a tomato tidal wave, the 2026 Heirloom Tomato Season is upon us.  Last week, I included a short list of the heirlooms we are featuring this year and a brief description.  This week, I am devoting the whole newsletter to the subject.

“Heirloom Tomatoes” were originally defined as open-pollinated, non-hybrid (and thus non-GMO) tomato varieties that had been handed down over the years from gardener to gardener, farmer to farmer.  They were everything that store-bought tomatoes were not, and had their own particular flavors, textures, shapes, sizes and colors.  Unfortunately, most of them also had major downsides when grown commercially.  They often produced few tomatoes, or none at all.  The plants were overly susceptible to both pests and diseases.  And they did not always produce “true to type” due to low-quality seed: when tomatoes are grown together in a field with other varieties, they will often cross-pollinate, creating entirely new and different types.  It might be fun for a backyard gardener to have a handful of plants producing a variety they didn’t expect, but for a commercial grower harvesting hundreds of boxes it is a disaster.

During the thirty years that we have been growing Heirlooms, professional seed breeders have gotten involved.  They have improved some of the old-time varieties to make them more commercially viable, adding disease and insect resistance and improving the yields to make them more economically viable.  They have created new, heirloom-like varieties — some of them actually hybrids of two or more actual heirloom types.  And seed companies have improved production practices for the seed so that growers don’t have to worry about whether the fruit they harvest will look like the picture and description in the seed catalog.

At TFF, we only grow a few varieties that are technically heirlooms.  All the others “improved” through standard plant breeding, or actual hybrids — meaning they are actually patented by the breeders.  A better name for them now might be “Artisan” or “Craft”, but they are still known by the moniker “Heirloom”.  Over the years, we have identified varieties that produce well here, have great flavor, and offer a diversity of colors, shapes and sizes.  Each of the variety names below is a clickable link to an image that you can use to identify the tomatoes that you received in your box each week.

 

Ananas Noire is French for “Black Pineapple”.  This tomato is a cross between two heirloom varieties that resulted a uniquely beautiful and tasty offspring. The large beefsteaks are green with red stripes, and a red-and-green mottled interior.  The flavor is very mild with lots of unami.

Black Prince: A small, round, dark purple heirloom tomato with a juicy, liquid center.  This is an early variety that ripens well in the spring here but hates our hot summers, so you’ll only see it early in the season.

Berkeley Pink-Tie Die: This is cross between two heirloom tomatoes with a deceiving name.  It is not Pink, but rather a dark purple beefsteak with green stripes on the outside.  It is both meaty and juicy with a slightly acidic flavor and lots of umami.

Carbon and Cherokee Purple are both purplish-pink Beefsteaks with meaty, slightly acidic flavor.  The Cherokee is a hybrid that ripens nicely in the spring but once it gets hot we switch to the more heat-tolerant Carbon.

 

Chef’s Choice Bi-Color is a very large beefsteak with red, orange and yellow stripes both outside and in.  It has a meaty texture and a very mild flavor.  It is a hybridized version of Marvel Stripe, which is a similar heirloom.

Chef’s Choice Orange is a hybrid that looks and tastes like an heirloom.  It produces medium-sized, orange tomatoes that are very meaty and sweet.

Costoluto Genovese is an heirloom Italian variety.  It’s a red, highly fluted “mini-beefsteak” with a bright flavor similar to Early Girl.

Lemon Boy is a hybrid Yellow tomato with a juicy interior and almost no acid.  It starts out as a large beefsteak, but as the season progresses it ends up a similiar size as Early Girl.

Mushroom Basket is our newest offering. It’s an heirloom variety from Russian that produces large, highly fluted beefsteak tomatoes with flesh that is both meaty and juicy.  It looks a bit like the Costoluto, but is larger and the color is pink instead of red.  It has a similar flavor to Brandywine, which we no longer grow, but ripens earlier and produces much more reliably.

Over the course of the season, you may get lucky enough to sample every one of these varieties, but we can’t guarantee that.  Occasionally, we have enough of one variety in  a given week to make sure that all the boxes get some, though.  When that happens, we’ll try to mention it in the newsletter.  But at least now you have a user guide to help you identify what you do get every week.  But please note that we send you the tomatoes when they are slightly-less than 100% ripe, so the full colors may not develop until they have sat on your kitchen counter for a day or three.

One additional note: Heirloom tomatoes are mostly not ideal for cooking. Most have a high percentage of water, so they take forever to cook and don’t make thick sauce. And even worse, their pretty colors tend to uniformly end up up brown due to their high content of sugar, which ends up caramelizing when exposed to heat.  In general, our Early Girls lend themselves much better to sauces and other cooking methods.

Thanks,