What’s NEW in landscaping, or WHAT THE HECK IS AN HEIRLOOM PLANT? (Part 1)

In the last couple of months, I’ve done several talks on the topic “7STEPS to a KNOCK-OUT LANDSCAPE,” which basically walks listeners through what I do when I design a garden.  While landscaping, as in any art, goes through phases of specific items or design styles being popular, the principles remain.  However, there are “new” trends that come and go.

Granny shows us HER garden!

Remember when we saw wooden cut-outs in folks’ yards?  Did anyone think Granny was really bent over, showing her undies?

The trend for the last several years, I believe, is one that will last.  In fact, it’s lasted already.  It is using HEIRLOOM PLANTS.  So what exactly IS an heirloom plant?  In general, heirloom plants are considered 1) those introduced before the mid-1940′s and  2) handed down from a past generation.  Now let the confusion begin.

ABOUT THE DATE:  Not everyone is a stickler on precise dates to qualify a plant to be an heirloom, although some horticultural groups only place plants in the HEIRLOOM category that can point to a precise linage, sort of like provenance for a piece of artwork.  Vegetables and fruits might be considered heirloom if they’ve been around since the end of World War II mainly because that’s about the time industrialized agriculture began.  Another school of thought puts the date at 1950 since the year 1951 brought introduction of hybrid varieties of plants on a broad scale from seed producers.  These hybrids, which are the love children of two different varieties (or even SPECIES), may have great taste or beautiful color or some other characteristic that is desirable, but they cannot necessarily make NEW love children.  They are often sterile.  Just like two mules – which are a cross between a horse and a donkey – are fruitless in their own way, so these hybrid plants might be.  Those with the ability to reproduce are a crap shoot, harkening back to one of the parents rather than the variety you originally purchased.

early "truck" farmers in Jacksonville, Texas

I come from a family of tomato farmers near Jacksonville, Texas.  The farm where my dad was raised – which belonged to his aunt and uncle – grew tomatoes commercially. It was called a “truck farm.”  They took their tomatoes to the train depot on a certain day each week in wooden crates (then bushel baskets) hoping they’d go home with an empty pick-up truck and a full pocket.   To sell a tomato to a wholesaler who in turn sold it to a tomato RE-seller, often grocery stores or restaurants, that tomato had to first look good, then it must travel well.  Taste did not necessarily SELL a tomato, although it might mean getting to sell to the same customer again.  So these truck farms began to grow plants that they knew to be dependable in their looks (uniform) and long-lasting (not rot before they reached their destination).  The taste or nutritional value was secondary, at best. Many of these tomatoes were hybrids BRED to have these specific traits by seed growers and then sold to the farmers.  The plants were unable to reproduce, which meant the farmers must buy new seeds every year from the seed company.  That is a cost of business they were willing to spend in order to compete, the COST of having tomatoes that looked good for a long time. So while the hybrid tomatoes might have traits you’d want to see over and over, the process to get them over and over was to buy the seeds over and over.

Which gets us to the next feature of an heirloom plant: the ability to pass it on, which I’ll discuss in part deux of WHAT’S NEW IN LANDSCAPING?  (An unadulterated personal plug here: if you are in the Houston area, I’ll be speaking on HEIRLOOM PLANTS at Cornelius Nursery on Friday… http://www.calloways.com/meet-authors)  

Passing on the tradition: HEIRLOOM TOMATOES

 ”There’s a freeze coming.  What do I do?”

I love hearing from my girls, but I’m really excited when they ask for my advice, although it’s often shared even when not requested.  Both of my daughters have inherited the gardening gene passed down from my dad, so when the youngest called a couple of days ago, we got to talk tomatoes.  Her heirloom ‘Texas Wild’ crop has been prolific this year.  She and her husband recently bought a house, warranting a relocation of her Topsy-Turvey, apartment garden to a more stable home in raised garden beds in the back yard.  With her traveling tomatoes at various stages of ripeness,  she wasn’t sure what to do about the impending Blue Norther scheduled to appear.

I explained the difference in PERENNIAL plants and ANNUAL ones, like the cherry tomatoes and her sweet basil.  Annuals, as the name would suggest, live their life out annually: seed to plant to flower to more seed. Theoretically, anyway.

Tomatoes are warm season plants, native to Peru.  Her heirloom tomatoes (those here before the 1940′s that have been passed down from someone else) are open-pollinated, so their seeds produce plants identical to the parent.  The seeds of the Texas Wild tomato I gave her yielded this year’s crop, but if she chooses to grow more next year, she’ll need to save some of the seed to re-plant once it warms up a bit next spring.  Sound difficult?  I promise.  It isn’t.  That’s the beauty of heirloom plants.

a bountiful harvest, courtesy of Sarah Colburn Stock

So, how can you save the crop AND the seed of heirloom tomatoes?

1) Lay out the ones that aren’t quite ripe yet, UNWASHED, on newspaper or other absorbent material.  And they are as touch-me-not as my girls were on a road trip, so give each one its own space. (Do not refrigerate them, as that will make them taste grainy.)

2) Green tomatoes can be sliced, coated in egg and then dredged in PANKO or other breading and fried or baked. YUMMY!

3) If you plan to cook soup or sauce with a tomato base, ripened fruits can go into a Zip-lock and then the freezer, as is.

4) Slice some of the ripe ones thin and remove the seeds.  Put the seeds onto an absorbent material to dry for next year’s crop.

In some areas, the seeds can go straight into the ground after the temps are above 70 or so degrees.  Otherwise, you might want to make starter pots to put into the garden later.  We’ll have that lesson this winter……if it’s requested!