Growing your own family heirloom?

[Ruby]

I'm curious if anyone is growing their own family's heirloom tomatoes.

Who grew them? Where did you get them? How far back were they grown?

I want to hear the stories behind these varieties!

[Worth1]

I don't really have a family heirloom tomato to tell about.
But I could make up a pretty good lie about my 7th time over grand mother stealing a tomato from king Louie the 16'ths garden during the whole head chopping deal.
And how I have some of those seeds carried on from that same tomato.8)
But I wont.

Worth

[piegirl]

A good friend shared one of her family heirloom toms with me.
I felt quite honored to receive a plant. They have grown this
one for about 100 years. While the first ones sampled at Midwest
Tom. Fest were not the best, the later ones were fanastic. The seeds
have probably mutated over the years but 'trapper' is very good.
Proved to be quite drought tolerant, survived a few light frosts,
and the toms I stored last fall ripened slowly and kept well.
All and all a nice tomato. Piegirl

[Ruby]

Sounds excellent, Piegirl!

Worth - I wouldn't mind hearing some fictional tomato tales. Would make for some interesting seed catalog reading.

[carolyn137]

Would make for some interesting seed catalog reading.

*******

it seems to me that there's enough great fiction re OP tomato varieties out there already and if you were an SSE member you'd find even more, but in context, probably not that many.

There's Oos Oos Pei, found in an Egyptian tomb several thousand years before tomatoes were even distributed to that area of the world, and then there was Sandia Mountain where seeds were found in a leather satchel and carbon dated to be about 100 years old, but C dating cannot be used for such a recent finding, and more.

But I bet there are many of us who could come up with some absolutely stupendous fictional tomato histories, and Worth is worthy of being among the best at doing that

And folks, I really am talking about the wrong fictional histories for certain tomato varieties found at current websites/catalogs.

Let me not spend the rest of the day citing where to find them online or in catalogs b'c the recent weather update suggests 12-18 inches of snow on Fri/Sat and I'm more concerned with UPS delivering my Easter dark chocolate rather than writing great fictional histories right now.

And I'm also ticked off b'c the warmish weather this week has cleared up the driveway and I could have wheeled my walker out to the garage to drive to town in my car, which has FAST wheels unlike the walker wheels, to get my sausage gravy with biscuits, three over light and home fries, which I haven't enjoyed since late November.

[sirtanon]

...then again, if one wants to find plenty of tomato fiction, one can always browse some of the Ebay tomato seed listings

[PaulF]

This is almost a true story; the fiction could be true but isn't.

As you travel across southern Iowa there are many, many Amish families who have moved to the area in recent years. At strategic highway intersections, families will park the buggy, tie the horse to a fencepost in the ditch to eat the grass and set up a table to sell baked goods, krafts or fresh from the garden vegetables including home grown tomatoes.

One day while speeding past the intersection of US34 and US65, I spotted a flash of red on one of the tables. The brakes were applied, the car was spun around just to see if I could discover a new family heirloom tomato. I asked the little boy with the flat brimmed black felt hat if he knew the names of the tomatoes he was selling and where they came from. He thought they were tomatoes the family always grew and wasn't aware of any special name. His mother was sitting in the buggy so I asked if he would see if his mom would know any more.

After a short conversation with the long skirted, bonnet wearing lady, the kid returned and told me one variety was from his Uncle Rutgers and the other was from a cousin named Mark, but everyone just called him Big Boy. Ahh the letdown.