Gardening Permaculture Forums Like Tomatoville

Grace Evente1966 · Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie View Post

Several of those dwarfs are listed as indeterminate. Are there any early, red determinates in the dwarf project? It would be neat to grow them next to some of the Monsanto/Semena commercial varieties and see how they all fare.

Arctic Rose is definitely a pink determinate. But when the dwarfs are called "indeterminate", we're still only looking at a 4 foot tall plant. That is smaller than most non-dwarf determinates.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie View Post

Do you think there has always been an inverse relationship between yield and quality in regard to commercially grown tomato varieties? Or is that a more modern occurrence, and if so, about what decade did commercial varieties start tasting so bad?

When I was a young teenager, I used to ride with the owner of a roadside market down thru Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi to buy fruits and vegetables. We always picked out the product that was "near" ripe in the fields. We used to pay 6 cents each for 30-50 pound watermelons. The tomatoes were pink to red on the vine and many times I participated in the picking. That was back when most veggies had some taste. That was back in the late 1950's and early 1960's.

Tasteless veggies is a more recent invention. They are harvested full-sized but unripe and then gassed to bring on color. The growers also love the biologists who developed tomatoes that keep longer, thus giving more time to get the product to market. They didn't seem to care that the products were tasteless.
They accepted the loss of taste for the ability to have more transit time for the product and they hoped we consumers wouldn't notice. When we did notice, they concluded that we were a captive audience and had to buy their junk anyhow. It would seem that we have been proving them right for a number of years now.

However, I've recently seen articles stating that now they are going to try to put some flavor into these cardboard excuses and they're gathering up lots of heirloom tomatoes to use for cross pollinating. U.C. Davis is one of the leads in this effort. I hope they succeed. It would be nice to have good tasting fresh tomatoes all year round. But, I'm willing to bet that the new good tasting cardboard will come to us at an inflated cost. They charged us more for providing bad tasting tomatoes all winter long. Why would they not charge us more for returning what they took away???

__________________
Ted
________________________
Owner & Sole Operator Of
The Muddy Bucket Farm
and Tomato Ranch