Best Heirloom Tomatoes Varieties

Bring back lively flavor with these best tasting tomato varieties. Heirloom tomatoes varieties can grow in your garden and used in delicious recipes.

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Bring back lively flavor with these best tasting tomato varieties. Heirloom tomatoes varieties can grow in your garden and used in delicious recipes.

Heirloom Tomatoes

There’s no other way to say this: Tomato flowers are promiscuous. They spread their pollen everywhere, mating with any tomato in the area. It’s no surprise that new varieties arise from these causal affairs, including a completely American original, Mortgage Lifter. The first Mortgage Lifter came from William Estler of Barboursville, West Virginia. He found the tomato growing in his garden in the 1920s and thought enough of it to stabilize its genetic traits. He had a lawyer register the name Mortgage Lifter in 1932. Estler sold thousands of plants from what he believed was an accidental cross between Pritchard and Ponderosa Pink tomatoes, the only two he grew on his farm.  One of his employees dubbed the fast-selling plants as “mortgage lifters,” and Estler adopted the name. The original Mortgage Lifter tomato variety weighs from one to three pounds, and is low acid, sweet, and meaty with small seed cavities. And yes, it’s pink.

About the same time Estler was stabilizing his variety Mortgage Lifter, M.C. Byles started his quest for the perfect tomato two counties away in Logan, West Virginia. Not a gardener, he complained to his wife Elizabeth that he disliked store-bought tomatoes. She fired back, “If the tomatoes don’t suit you, then go and invent you one that does.” So, he went to the library and read about breeding tomatoes. He settled on four varieties he liked and cross-pollinated them; German Johnson and Belgium Giant were probably two of the varieties used. Once he had the tomato he wanted, Byles sold plants for $1 each during the Great Depression. After he sold his first six thousand, Byles paid off his home’s mortgage — hence another Mortgage Lifter.

Plump orange ones, green cherry tomatoes, fuzzy yellow salad types, chestnut brown beefsteak tomatoes — these are what the average person thinks of when they hear the words “heirloom vegetables.” Tomatoes have become the stars of the heirloom world, featured on gourmet menus, temptingly stacked in organic grocery stores, and featured as the bestsellers at farmers’ markets. Heirloom tomatoes are everywhere, educating consumers about how succulent, savory, and exciting heirlooms are. Tomatoes are the most widely grown vegetable worldwide, and now heirlooms have become the most sought-after ones for gardens and dinner plates, almost to the point of obsession. That’s because there are so many colors, shapes, and flavors beyond the round, red, hard hybrid tomatoes we’ve been fed for over seventy years. Let’s try some.

  • Updated on Apr 4, 2023
  • Originally Published on Oct 8, 2013
Tagged with: heirloom tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
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