How to Grow a Better Tomato: The Case against Heirloom Tomatoes

[angelatc]

Inbreeding is bad for tomatoes as well as people, it seems.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...loom-tomatoes/

No matter how you slice it, however, their seeming diversity is only skin-deep: heirlooms are actually feeble and inbred—the defective product of breeding experiments that began during the Enlightenment and exploded thanks to enthusiastic backyard gardeners from Victorian England to Depression-era West Virginia. Heirlooms are the tomato equivalent of the pug—that "purebred" dog with the convoluted nose that snorts and hacks when it tries to catch a breath.

[amy31416]

Interesting.

I always grow cherry and/or grape tomatoes because the plants are so ridiculously hearty that I've found that they can often become semi-perennials even up this way. Romas are for sauce, and produce amazingly well also--but yeah, I do like the flavor of the heirloom varieties for other purposes--raw generally with some mozzarella, olive oil and basil--or filled with tuna salad, etc.

It'd be interesting to intentionally cross-pollinate some of the heirloom varieties to get a balance between quantity and flavor. But from the article, it seems that the flavor just has more to do with yield than with specific varieties. One of these days I'll get that greenhouse and get some experimental stuff done.

Seriously though--grape and cherry tomatoes are ridiculously productive, and they really don't taste too bad. Just a bit sweet for me to eat on a regular basis.

[XNavyNuke]

I'll see your 2009 Scientific American article and raise you a 2013 one.

. Why Heirloom Tomatoes Taste So Good

From the 2009 article the answer would be because brain dead granola cruncher prefer pin-headed mongoloids. But alas no.

.In a study published in June in Current Biology, researchers took a close look at the chemical composition of both standard tomatoes and more than 100 different heirloom varieties, which they also fed to 170 volunteers in a taste test. Their new findings confirm what scientists have learned in recent years: a tomato's flavor depends not only on the balance of sugars and acids within the fruit but also on subtle fragrant compounds—many of which are lacking in the modern supermarket tomato.

.Compared with heirloom varieties, stan-dard tomatoes have less geranial and other volatile compounds. “They're kind of like light beer,” he says. “Even if all the chemicals are there, they are at lower levels.”

Joe six pack loves his light beer. Brain dead granola crunchers are likely home brewers anyway.

Open pollinated varieties do lack hybrid vigor but that is easily remedied by grafting which any gardener can do on a small scale.
In Defense of Grafting

Here is a Youtube video that shows you how easy it is to do. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tHnOYcI6B44 The stem clamps can be made of Tygon tubing from the plumbing section of Lowes. You can buy seed of special tomato rootstocks used in greenhouse growing or simply by using a disease resistant hybrid as your rootstock.

XNN