Heirloom vegetables offer the best taste, the brightest colors, the most diversity, and a connection to our gardening foreparents throughout the world. The authentic flavors transport us to simpler times when there were more home-cooked meals and taste trumped convenience. Gardeners can help maintain traditions and eat well by growing some of these heirlooms this season.
Tomatoes are the most coveted heirloom vegetables. Varieties include:
• Garden Peach – one of my favorites introduced in the mid 1800s. A medium size, heavy-bearing, sweet tasting tomato first given to me in ’98 by expert fruit grower and Master Gardener, Ruth Melilus. Fuzzy skin and orange-yellow color just like a peach and it is less acidic than most.
• Cherokee Purple – Cultivated by Native American Cherokee tribe in Tennessee. Large, purplish, beefsteak fruits with rich, sweet flavor. Productive plants are drought and disease tolerant.
• Abraham Lincoln – An Illinois native like Lincoln. Mid-sized, brilliant red, round tomatoes in clusters. Savory, slightly acidic tomato. Disease resistant.
• Black Crimson – Cultivated on the Isle of Krim in the Black Sea near Russia. Large, slightly flattened, maroon, beefsteak tomatoes. Intense, slightly salty taste. Stocky enough for container culture.
• Dixie Golden Giant – An Amish grown tomato from the early 1930′s. Large, golden-yellow beefsteaks. Sweet taste with meaty texture. Big plants
• Principe Borghese – Italian cultivar bred for drying and canning. Small, pointed fruits with thick skin produced in mass on sturdy plants. Low maintenance. Tomatoes can be left on the plant to dry. Best as a cooking tomato. Drought tolerant.
• Mortgage Lifter – Most popular heirloom story. Bred in West Virginia by Radiator Charlie Byles (who had no formal training or experience in horticulture) in the 1930’s. He crossbred four of his largest tomatoes and developed a stable variety after a few years of selecting the best ones. Radiator Charlie sold enough of the huge, pink beefsteak seedlings to pay off his mortgage in six years. People throughout the Mid-Atlantic region would drive hundreds of miles for his seedlings. What else could he call it, but Mortgage Lifter? Award winning taste (and story).
Try one or a few and you’ll be soon be hooked. After tasting these delicious beauties, you’ll never eat a bland fast food or salad tomato again.
