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Photo Credit: Burpee Seed Co.

Heirloom tomatoes come in an amazing rainbow of colors, sizes and tastes!

But how did these delicious plants come to be? While a New World plant, the tomato probably wasn’t grown by Native Americans until the Spanish arrived. Europeans were likely the first to cultivate it here, and the fruit’s consumption spread slowly (perhaps because the plant’s a member of the poisonous nightshade family, so people were less likely to trust it). Eventually, tomato seeds crossed the Atlantic and were eventually grown throughout Europe – and even Asia.

Early tomato gardeners noted how the fruit was inclined to mutate into different colors, forms and tastes. Families tended to improve these early tomatoes according to their own preferences, and the result was a rainbow of colors and a smorgasbord of flavors and shapes we now enjoy. Today, heirloom growers can choose from reds, oranges and pinks; whites, creams and yellows; and purples, browns and blacks.

So what exactly is an heirloom plant? There’s a bit of controversy in regard to the tomato, but experts generally recognize three general categories: commercial, family and created.

Commercial heirlooms are those introduced by seed companies before 1940. Sometimes the seed companies bought the rights to a certain cultivar from a private source. The companies then either improved it or sold the seeds just as they were from the parent plant. Some of these commercial varieties are hybrids. Simply explained, a hybrid is a cross between two unrelated cultivars to obtain a desirable characteristic from each (for example, one parent for good taste and another for resistance to wilt). Some purists tend to discount commercial varieties as heirlooms because using hybrid seeds likely yields plants that are dissimilar from the cultivar.