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this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Can't say I blame them for trying. Selling larger, more robust, and flavourless varieties worked on us with both chicken and tomatoes. The first time I tried a garden tomato was eye-opening. Would love to track down one of the farms selling the old chicken breeds as well, but I hear those are pretty expensive.
Tomatoes have the largest difference in quality, people often think they don't like tomatoes until they taste good heirloom ones.
Store tomatoes are bred for firmness.
The original cardboard tomato contained the rin gene. This completely shutdown the production of ethylene. These tomatoes never turned red until ethylene gas was applied externally.
These types fell out of favor when varieties with down regulated ethylene response and production were developed. These types will turn red but are always firm and mostly flavorless.
The tomatoes on the vine tend to have more flavor. But if you can find some locally grown ones they might be the best.
Yeah, that's what I get through the winter, then I grow tomatoes in the summer. But there youbhave to be careful too. Some seeds end up being the same mass produced crap that industrial farms use. I heard years back that a university in Florida had developed a varietal that solved all conventional problems with tomatoes for the big corporate farms but still managed to prioritize the taste. You could apparently order seeds online. Always wanted to try that.
maybe heirloom tomatoes?
Don't bother, those varieties are still pretty bland. They were still bred for shipping AKA firmness. So they were very slightly better than the ones you normally find at the grocery store.
My county's extension office does a spring fair where they sell about a hundred varieties of heirloom tomato seedlings. They're not bred for grocery stores and are delicious
Eventually when I retire, I am thinking of doing a little backcross breeding on OP tomatoes. Pulling in all the modern disease resistance package into the older varieties would make growing them much easier.
The hardest part is finding a pathologist to run the screens. I could also speed it up a bit with molecular markers but you can never completely trust them. You have to run the pathology screens.