Hylooms vs. Heirlooms: Which Taste Better?

$25 per person | Saturday, August 28 at 2 p.m. | Granby Farm – 7 Carver Street

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For this year’s Tomato Festival, Red Fire Farm is offering a number of special tasting sessions for the general public to sample our many varieties of tomato and provide crucial feedback.

Tomato plants don’t always grow that easily, as their fruits are prone to splitting, catfacing, foliar diseases, poor pollination, and other issues.  For this reason, tomato breeders and farmers are always trying to grow new varieties that have more resistance to diseases, more vigor and better durability against rain, splitting, and handling.

Generally, the best-tasting tomato varieties are heirloom varieties with seeds selected and saved by gardeners in generations past, but these same heirlooms are often the most fragile, split-prone, and disease-prone of all the varieties. Modern day breeders have been busy in recent years breeding varieties that have the color and appearance of the classic heirloom varieties, but how do these modern heirloom lookalikes stack up for flavor when compared side by side with the true heirlooms?

Come to this workshop and find out for yourself! Some matchups we want the public to rate: Brandywine vs Enroza.  Cherokee Purple vs Marnero.  Striped German vs JTO-16-1053.  Aunt Ruby German Green vs E15B.42115 .

We are growing trial plantings of experimental tomato varieties from two seed companies this year (Johnny’s Selected Seeds & Vitalis Organic Seeds), and in this tasting we will compare some of the new breeding lines and modern varieties side-by-side with the true heirlooms that they emulate.  This tasting will be rounded out with other cool varieties that we are excited about, mostly from the Wild Boar Farm breeding program. Depending on what is ripe and prime when farmer Ryan picks for this tasting, these might include among others Dark Galaxy, Crushed Heart, Lovely Lush, and Blood Moon!