Family Heirlooms

garlic drying in our garden shed in Louisiana

Years ago when we lived on 23+ acres of land in Georgia, I grew several heirloom tomatoes for the first time--Cherokee purple, green zebra, among others. The tomatoes were very colorful, and I managed to encourage my two kids into eating them as healthy snacks by slicing the tomatoes and arranging them in a colorful pattern on a white platter. I called the dish "tomato snacks," and the kids often asked for this dish as a midday, summer treat--another example of presentation being everything. 

The beautiful diversity of heirloom tomatoes is one reason to grow them, and I have been growing different heirlooms ever since. They are tastier than most hybrid tomatoes, and they are open-pollinated, so that you can save seed to plant the next year and have true-to-the original descendants of the parent plants. 

There are some possible drawbacks: some heirlooms seem to be more susceptible to various fungal or bacterial wilts or root rot. A couple of our plants this year have succumbed to such a disease. But even hybrids bred to be disease-resistant can have problems. The Better Boy tomatoes that we planted in our greenhouse here have tended to have blossom end rot, a dark, leathery spreading "sore" on the bottom of the tomatoes. The soil in the greenhouse includes chicken manure that accumulated in what was once a chicken house. Perhaps we didn't water the plants sufficiently at just the right time, or perhaps there was a calcium deficiency in the soil, or perhaps we planted those tomatoes too early. Not all the tomatoes from the Better Boy plants have developed blossom end rot, and other tomatoes in the greenhouse seem to be doing very well. But we are noting these problems for next year, as we rotate the tomatoes to other areas of the garden to reduce the chances of those diseases spreading further.

Heirloom vegetables are also interesting because the seeds have been passed down for generations and often have interesting origin stories attached to them. For example, the Mortgage Lifter tomato is said to have been bred by a guy who cross-pollinated five tomato varieties and saved the seed. He planted that seed and saved its progeny seed for several years until he had a stable descendant plant with the fruit qualities he desired in a tomato. He then sold the seed and made enough money at the time to pay off the mortage to his house. You can now buy Mortgage Lifter tomato seeds from seed catalogs. As this writer says, "Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us and extending the link to our children, grandchildren, and beyond." 

Tom standing among the heirloom tomatoes we grew in 2013, Louisiana

Over the years we have saved seed from season to season as well as planted the descendants of plants that our grandparents grew. I have lost count of such plants that we have left behind in our moves, still flourishing, I hope, in our absence. However, we have managed to bring along with us one vegetable that is the descendant of ones my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and her mother before her grew: bunching onions. My dad has grown these onions for years, and we got our onion plants from him. 

Year after year, we grew these onions, eating what we wanted to eat and saving others for planting the following year. If we moved and were unable to salvage onion plants in the move, my dad always had plenty to give us for planting in our new garden. But then my dad and mom moved, and Dad thinks he may have lost his onions to too much rain and then drought in the garden he left behind. Fortunately, we managed to bring some of those family heirloom onions with us to Arizona, where they have flourished in our garden. So, this year, we may be giving back to my dad the heirlooms we first got from him and that he got from his mother and grandmother. 

Cassie watches as Tom transplants onions in our AZ garden, onions that are descendants of ones my dad, my grandmother and her mother planted in their gardens.

Our bunching onions were primed to grow in the winter in the South, and we didn't know how they would do at a much higher elevation and a much cooler climate. We kept some in pots in our sunroom over last winter, and only a few plants survived. However, the ones we planted in the garden last summer, right after we moved into this house, managed to survive winter temperatures in the single digits. Their growing clock reset, and they flourished this summer, as evidenced in the photos above and below, where only two or three bunches, pulled apart and transplanted singly, filled out two full rows.

Tom pulls apart bunching onions to transplant them.

When we pull the tomato plants out of the greenhouse, Tom plans to plant some onions there, as well, so that we can observe which ones do better, the ones exposed to the winter weather or the ones in a more sheltered space. (The greenhouse is not heated.)

Growing these heirloom onions that my grandmother grew connects me to a history of family gardening, not just vegetable gardening but flower gardening, as well. For years, I also grew purple globe amaranth flowers because they were among my grandmother's favorites. I always got seed from her...until her plants finally died out as she got too fragile to care for them, I moved once too often, and those seeds were lost forever. Now I have to order seeds from gardening catalogs, and they are not always easy to find.

Just like any family heirloom, heirloom vegetables connect us to the past and enrich the present.