This year’s main tomato crop was planted in pots on Jan. 9 and transplanted into the garden six weeks and one day later, on Feb. 21. Now, 57 days later, we’re harvesting sublime ripe beefstake-type tomatoes from heirloom seed stock.
Good eating aside, the amazing thing about the above factoids is that they represent the result of just two years of tomato trials and seed selection on a very small scale, starting with two varieties that, unselected, take more than 20 days longer to ripen than ours.
After trying numerous heirlooms, our tests showed two pink beefstakes – German Johnson and Belgium Giant – produced more and better-tasting tomatoes under our somewhat difficult semi-South Texas growing conditions. However, both took too long to ripen for our conditions, since by June the daytime highs often exceed 90 degrees, at which temperature most tomato plants stop setting new fruit.
(German Johnson is an old variety said to be one of two parents used in the development of another heirloom, Mortgage Lifter, so-called because supposedly the breeder thereof sold so many ‘maters that the income took care of his house payments. I never would’ve included Belgium Giant in our tomato trials in the first place, had it not arrived in a seed shipment as a free bonus, because the variety was developed in Ohio specifically for conditions there. Plus it’s listed as taking 85 days from transplanting in the garden until ripening, while German Johnson generally is listed as taking 80 days.)
For the past two years, we saved seeds from the German Johnson and Belgium Giant plants that produced the earliest and best-tasting tomatoes, and that also showed some signs of resistance to the various strains of wilts common to our soils here. Through only two years of selective breeding, we’ve managed to shave 20 days or more off the ripening time of these two heirloom varieties. I can only imagine what someone could do if they were able to devote five years and half an acre to a similar effort. Great things, probably.
The point is that this plant’s DNA is so malleable that, wherever you live, you can “create” a superior open-pollinated tomato that can handle your local climate, soil and pests and produce good yields of fruit that taste a lot better than the generic hybrid varieties hawked by most seed companies.
And as a bonus, your seeds are free forever.
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Great article! We start seeing those 90′s at the end of March and the last freeze is right around mid February. Makes for a pretty small window for maters here in the desert.
Yeah, I must say Arizona is a pretty challenging place for a tomato plant. I had them started in a cold frame years back when I lived in Tempe, and everything seemed fine until the plants got about 2.5 to 3 feet tall. At that height, constant desert wind carrying tiny bits of rock sanded off the plant tops…