Australia Network
English Bites
Print  |  Close


print friendly page for http://australianetwork.com/englishbites/stories/s1204652.htm
 
30 September 2004
 
Tomatoes
 
Today we find out about a very common garden plant that people love to eat.

MELISSA KING: Commercial tomatoes have been developed for tougher skins, uniformity of shape, colour and ripening, and improved storage and transport life. So it's not surprising that they're often lacking in flavour.

This focus on commercial traits has seen the disappearance of many of the good old traditional varieties.

Thankfully seed savers networks and keen gardeners are rediscovering the wealth of heirloom tomatoes.

Heirlooms are garden-worthy varieties, which have stood the test of time.

They have been selected and saved by generations of gardeners, and offer some of the best tasting and best yielding varieties. Garden trials here in Australia have shown that they're easy to grow, reliably productive and their pest and disease resistance is often just as good as modern varieties.

Growing a diversity of tomatoes offers the best chance for conservation of these unique varieties, and unlike hybrids, which don't produce the same plants from seed, the seed of heirloom varieties can be collected and saved year after year.

DAVID CAVAGNARO: Few of us realise that all the wonderful foods that we eat, we wouldn't have today if it weren't for the efforts of hundreds of thousands of backyard farmers and gardeners over centuries of time, growing and preserving the incredible genetic diversity that goes into the food supply we have today.

And so if we don't continue to do that, if we don't continue to save the genetic diversity that is the basis of all of our foods, we will find that in the future we will just have far less wonderful varieties and far less adequate food supply.

MELISSA KING: Now, tomatoes vary in size, from these tiny pea-sized fruits of wild tomatoes right through to the bigger beafsteak varieties like this one which is called Black Krim, has a lovely charcoal-coloured flesh.

Now, some varieties have a real 'bite' to them, whereas others are deliciously sweet.

DAVID CAVAGNARO: There's nothing like growing your own food, in general. I mean it makes the garden a very much more interesting place.

Many of these varieties are beautiful to look at, and nothing more than tomatoes that give you that wonderful smell of summer and the incredible taste of a vine-ripened tomato in the warm sun of summer.

story notes

commercial tomatoes
Commercial tomatoes are tomatoes grown for sale.


heirloom tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes are old varieties of tomatoes that have been grown in peoples gardens for many years.


garden-worthy varieties
A garden-worthy variety is a type that is good to grow in your garden or worth growing. The suffix –worthy means that the thing is suitable or deserving of something. We say someone is trustworthy, if they can be trusted. Or a story worth putting in a newspaper is called newsworthy.


stood the test of time
have proved themselves to be good over many years The plays of Shakespeare have stood the test of time.


backyard farmers and gardeners
Backyard farmers and gardeners are the people who have fruit and vegetable patches in their own back gardens.


tomatoes
Notice that he said ‘tomaytoes’. North Americans pronounce it this way, to rhyme with ‘potato’.

But Australians say ‘tomato’.

Tomatoes has an unusual plural. You add an ‘e’ and then the ‘s’. For more check out today's spotlight.


vine-ripened tomato
tomatoes left on the vine until ripe, or ready to eat