Heirloom vegetables make resurgence

Some folks collect antiques because they like to cling to history. That's also true with heirloom vegetables; we want to grow varieties that have proven themselves over the years. They're the vegetables that Grandma grew.

One gardener developed the Mortgage Lifter tomato and sold its seeds to pay off his mortgage during the Depression.

Heirloom vegetables offer a spectacular range of flavors and shapes. They may be tart or sweet, green instead of red, long instead of oval or ribbed instead of smooth, and have flavor you'll never find at the grocery store.

The term heirloom loosely applies to marvelous vegetables established before World War II. Back then, organic gardening was the standard.

After the war and into the 1970s, hybrids dominated the commercial vegetable market, pushing older varieties into the background. Now there is a resurgence of those flavorful heirlooms.

Heirlooms are open-pollinated, meaning seeds you collect this season will produce plants with similar characteristics of the parent next season. That's the key to their survival.

Gardeners who saved seeds helped preserve many heirlooms. Other seeds traveled around the world in pockets or letters of immigrants, which is why so many varieties have names that hail from Russia, Italy, Japan, France and Germany.

But many other heirlooms are commercially bred and found in seed catalogs of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The name Burpee turns up in many heirloom vegetable catalogs, dating to the founding of W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in 1876.

Why did we drift more to hybrid vegetables?

Breeders developed hybrids for two main reasons: to make large-scale commercial production and distribution easier and more profitable and to make vegetables easier for gardeners who might not be as sure of their skills as their farmer ancestors.

Flavor might not have been the highest priority for 20th century breeders, but they created hybrids with several useful qualities.

■ Disease resistance: Many diseases can wipe out many vegetables. Hybrids, especially tomatoes and corn, were bred to make them more resistant.

■ Higher yields: Hybrids produce much larger crops. Most heirlooms, such as Brandywine, were very low producers.

■ Uniformity: Commercial growers quickly learned that funny-looking vegetables didn't sell. They developed hybrids that were more consistent in size, shape and color. Supermarket tomatoes all became red, and now garden hybrids reflect these traits.

■ Marketability: Hybrid vegetables were easier to pack, didn't bruise much or go bad during shipments. This enables us to have fresh vegetables all year.

■ Hybrid vigor: First-generation hybrids grow vigorously and produce more than older varieties. But they're only produced commercially, which means you have to buy new seed each year.

■ Timing: Breeders soon developed tomatoes that developed to a certain point so growers were able to ripen all of them at the same time. This greatly reduced the cost of processing tomatoes, as the machines worked the fields only once. We now have determinate tomatoes such as the Patio.

Today, breeders are looking for the best of both worlds, crossing modern hybrids with flavorful heirlooms. This will make old-style taste part of the equation along with disease resistance, consistency and higher yields. We now have several Brandywine hybrids that are less risky but are open-pollinated, so you'll get consistent results by saving seeds.

So do you choose heirlooms or hybrids? It's a polarizing question.

Most gardeners focus on results. They place the highest priority on getting lots of tomatoes with only a few problems. This seems to be the trend.

Fortunately, there's plenty of middle ground. You can select dependable, disease-resistant hybrid varieties and plant two or three heirlooms each year. If you're growing tomatoes in containers, choose determinate varieties .

A diversity of choices for gardeners is good and helps to expand the gene pool.

COMPANION PLANTING

Let Master Gardener Richard Cutbirth show you how different types of plants working together will beautify your yard. He'll be speaking at noon Tuesday at the Sunset Garden Club meeting at the Paseo Verde Library, 280 S. Green Valley Parkway in Henderson. It's open to the public .

Linn Mills' garden column appears on Sundays. He can be reached at 822-7754 or linn.mills@springspreserve.org.