Above: Ripe (?) Aunt Ruby’s German Green (?) tomato. It’s definitely a tomato. The rest is speculation.
In brief.
This year I’m using one of my raised garden beds to grow three varieties of heirloom tomatoes. These were all selected based on a reputation for outstanding taste.
- Cherokee Purple
- Aunt Ruby’s German Green
- Chocolate Stripes
These are now ripening.
All three taste pretty good. But that’s all. So far, to me, they aren’t head-and-shoulders better than other tomatoes I’ve grown. A ripe Cherokee Purple can hold its own against any other tomato I’ve had. The German Green and Chocolate Stripes are different, in a pleasant way.
None of these, as I grew and harvested them, takes tomatoes to a new level. Not for me, anyway. Not yet.
So in this post I’m pondering what, if anything, I’m doing wrong. Is this maybe the wrong soil or climate for growing tasty tomatoes? Maybe it’s me — maybe I’m unable to taste the difference. Or maybe the outstanding taste of these heirloom varieties has been oversold.
I think (and hope) that the answer is that I’ve just been harvesting them too early. With modern hybrid tomatoes, you can pick them a few days before full ripeness, and they’ll come to (very nearly) peak flavor sitting on the kitchen counter. I’m beginning to think that these heirloom tomatoes are not nearly so forgiving.
Plus, seriously, tomatoes that remain green when they are ripe? What was I thinking?
Tomato strategy part 3: Heirloom “high taste” tomatoes
This year I’ve been focusing on tomatoes in the garden, using a four part strategy (Post G22-001). That includes:
- Early season tomatoes.
- Paste tomatoes (for drying).
- Heirloom “high taste” tomatoes, reputed to have excellent flavor.
- Heat-tolerant tomatoes (for the dog days of August).
In each case, I’m going to the least possible effort. I prepared the soil reasonably well, and I keep them watered. But that’s about it. I’m letting them sprawl, and I’m doing no preventative or curative spraying to combat various leaf diseases that tomatoes are prone to.
1: The early-season tomatoes have been an outstanding success. Not only did I have fresh tomatoes in June, they tasted pretty good, and they are still producing well. Of the three I’m growing, I’d say that the Burpee’s Fourth of July (hybrid, indeterminate) is the winner based on yield, taste, and disease resistance. They came in early and still going strong. Glacier (open pollinated, determinate or semi-determinate) is pretty good, but those didn’t seem to be quite as tangy as Fourth of July, and those now seem to be shutting down and/or succumbing to leaf diseases. Siletz (open pollinated, determinate) produced fine tomatoes, but with markedly lower yield and far less disease resistance. Siletz is clearly just about done for the year. Only the very tops of the plants remain green.
Going forward, I’m going to pull out the spent tomato plants (Siletz, Glacier) and let the indeterminate Fourth of July sprawl into that space. At this point, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get production out of Fourth of July through fall. Which is, in fact, how Burpee markets them. As a bonus, they are a nice size for drying.
2: The paste tomatoes have been a rolling disaster. My bad. Bad luck (chewed down by deer early on), bad location (back lot line, maybe not enough sun), bad soil (they are planted in the native clay soil, bad technique (woven black plastic cloth for mulch). Unsurprisingly, the results are pitiful. I have maybe 20 surviving plants, from the first batch I planted, and I might get a handful of ripe tomatoes daily.
I have a half-dozen that I planted later, in my raised beds, so those might save this from being a total disaster. But my grandiose vision of hundreds of tomatoes, for sun-drying, clearly isn’t going to happen this year.
4: My heat-tolerant tomatoes are on schedule. They were planted quite late, and they are just now starting to flower. Which was the plan, as most tomatoes won’t set fruit during extremely hot weather. So it’s too soon to tell, but those are at least on schedule and not yet dead.
3: Which only leaves my heirloom “high taste” tomatoes. I have three varieties, four plants each, occupying one raised bed. They are sprawling in that bed just fine, and show only minor indications of leaf diseases so far.
And now, those are ripening. I think.
The oddities of heirloom tomatoes
Cherokee Purple (top), Siletz and Glacier (bottom). All quite tasty. But maybe not completely ripe.
Oddity 1: What’s a ripe tomato supposed to look like?
Here’s the first surprising thing I learned about heirloom tomatoes: In some cases, people don’t even agree on what any particular variety of heirloom tomato is supposed to look like when ripe.
If you use Google to search for pictures of some standard commercially-produced tomato, you will find that everybody agrees on what that tomato looks like when it is ripe. Here’s the result of searching Big Boy Tomato on Google, looking for images, and capturing the first two rows of images:
Plus or minus a difference in how the exact shade of color appears, everybody agrees on what a ripe Big Boy (and similar) tomato looks like.
Now try that with Chocolate Stripes, an heirloom (open-pollinated, it’s not actually that old) that I think I’m growing in my garden right now. Here’s what a ripe chocolate stripes tomato looks like:
That’s everything from straight-up green with a little tinge of red, to solid orange-red with just a hint of green. And everything in-between. Including one that was clearly sliced up for eating when it was still mostly green.
Or Aunt Ruby’s German Green.
Everything from solid green through-and-through, to a tinge of red, a tinge of yellow, or with orange flesh inside a mostly-green exterior. The latter being how I ate mine, as shown at the top of the post
By contrast, with Cherokee Purple, everybody seems to agree, just as with a Big Boy. You eat it when it’s a nice, deep red. The “purple” part comes from some remaining green pigment on the shoulders, which gives that part of the tomato (and only that part) a purple appearance.
Oddity 2: How well will they ripen off the vine? Has that been bred into modern commercial hybrids?
Tomatoes are climacteric fruits, that is, once they start to ripen, they will continue to ripen, even if picked. That much is fact.
The controversy about picking tomatoes early boils down to taste. Will they taste as good, picked early and allowed to ripen inside, as they would if allowed to ripen fully on the vine?
Seemingly sensible gardeners disagree strongly about this. Some say that it doesn’t matter, and that tomatoes allowed to ripen inside taste identical to those allows to ripen on the plant. Others argue that this is not the case, and that leaving them on the vine until completely ripe leads to a materially better finished product.
You may wonder why any home gardener would pick tomatoes before they are fully ripe.
It’s easy enough to understand why commercial growers pick them early. They are much easier to handle, store, and transport. That’s why “vine ripened” tomatoes in the stores are typically picked well before the tomato is fully ripe.
Source: Ripening Tomatoes, Marita Cantwell, Dept. Plant Sciences, UC Davis,
Fruit Ripening and Retail Handling Workshop, Postharvest Technology Center, UC Davis, March 18-19, 2013
Why would a home gardener do that? Here are a few reasons: Squirrels, birds, deer, rain-induced cracking, and rot. Every day that a red (ish) tomato sits on the plant is another day of exposure to those hazards. Some times I feel like I get just about one usable tomato for every tomato that was spoiled by some combination of those factors. The upshot is that fewer tomatoes are spoiled by those pests if I pick them before they are fully ripe.
In the past, I grew nothing but standard commercial hybrids (— Boy, — Girl, and the like). I am pretty sure that those will reach their peak flavor — or very nearly — even if ripened inside, off the plant. At least, I could never tell the difference between ones picked with solid green shoulders and ones picked completely red.
But now I wonder if that trait wasn’t bred into those standard hybrid tomatoes. And whether these heirloom (open pollinated) varieties may lack that trait. And maybe there is a controversy over this issue because picking early makes a marked flavor difference for some tomatoes, but not for others.
Conclusion: Eat no tomato before its time.
So for this next round of taste tests, I’m going to let those heirloom tomatoes get as ripe as they possibly can. That means letting them sit on the vine until they more-or-less fall off if touched. And then leaving them inside until they as red-ish as they are going to get, or until they are soft right up to the shoulders.
So, not “edible” or “adequately ripe”, but just-this-side-of-rotting ripe. Which, because I am new to this, will take some experimentation.
I will surely lose more of them to misadventure if I do that. But that’s the only way to rule out “picked too early” as the root cause of my O.K.-but-not-fantastic heirloom tomatoes.
