They were terrific tomatoes! I loved them and have grown them several times since then. They are an old hybrid---back when they were bred, they were bred for flavor!!! They did great here---produced heavily and produced great-tasting fruit. They just have that typical red hybrid fruit flavor that I remember from my childhood---say, the 1960s and 1970s, back when breeders were more concerned about plants that produced good yields of tasty fruit. Nowadays, the breeders seem overly focused on tough skin that tolerates shipping and disease-tolerance, and flavor doesn't seem to be on their priority list. A couple of other tomato varieties I grew at the same time that I first started growing Ramapo also were outstanding---Supersonic and Moreton.

Thank you for the information, the tomatoes of today are bred for like you say and also to be picked by machine and so they can sit on a grocery store shelf for several weeks without appearing to go bad. I really enjoy hearing about the different varieties of older tomatoes.

You're welcome. That's why I love the old tomatoes. I've despised grocery store tomatoes since at least the 1970s. It seems like in the 1960s (but I was awfully young then, so maybe I am not remembering it well) we still had some good grocery store tomatoes. I'm going to assume they were locally grown because we did have several market growers in our area then that grew tomatoes for local stores. Those were the good old days! I read a great book once called "Can You Trust A Tomato in January?" and learned more about modern-day tomato breeding, growing, harvesting, shipping, storing and selling than I really wanted to know....but it did help me understand why grocery store tomatoes are so bad.

Do you remember the Flavr Savr tomato? I think it was bred by CalGene. This was in the early or mid-1990s. You could buy a Flavr Savr tomato and set it on the counter and it would last for months without going bad, or so they said. The PR said it was tasty, but the American public said otherwise. Perhaps no one was ready then for what was, admittedly, the first GMO tomato. Of course, the flavor and texture were about as good as plastic or cardboard and the American people didn't want to buy tomatoes that would last forever but which didn't have the flavor/texture of an actual tomato, so perhaps it was irrelevant that it was a GMO. Perhaps if the flavor and texture had been good, people would have ignored the fact that they were GMO tomatoes. Then, Monsanto bought CalGene and that was the end of the Flavr Savr. I am not sure if it failed because people didn't like it and wouldn't buy more, or because it was a GMO tomato, or if it was just that Monsanto took the GMO breeding/research in a different direction---more towards commodity crops. Regardless, when the Flavr Savr went away, no one seemed to miss it.

Personally I think horrible grocery store tomatoes create many new gardeners. Lots of gardeners start out veggie gardening with just a few tomato plants, largely because they want tomatoes that taste like Dad, Mom, Grandpa or Grandma once grew and you know that we cannot get tomatoes like that in a grocery store. So, I think as long as grocery store tomatoes stay as awful as they are, we'll always have another crop of young/new gardeners joining the ranks so they can grow their own.

There was a documentary on PBS a year or so ago called 'The Seed Savers'. According to them Monsanto and others like them have filed patents on many different vegetable varieties and making hybrids of them to keep people from saving seeds, that way they have a monopoly on seed, I don't know if this is really true but it is concerning. That was the reason for the documentary about different people around the country trying to save as many old strains of vegetables as they can so if something catastrophic should happen we would have open pollinated types to fall back on. I didn't know about the Flavr Savr tomatoes, I didn't know grocery store tomatoes had names, shows what I know, but I know most don't have any flavor. I imagine you get tired of me always asking so many questions about different tomatoes, you are the only one I know who has knowledge about so many different kinds, and I know you will give your opinion on how they grow & taste. Thank You, you help so many people with their garden questions and help make this forum what it is.

Carol Depp wrote about the Flavr Savr tomato in one of her books. I can't recall if it was in in The Resilient Gardener or The Tao of Vegetable Gardening. She is the only person I know of who actually purchased a Flavr Savr. She purchased it out of curiosity, took it home, sliced it and tried it. She ended up spitting out the first bite! She said it tasted of kerosene! Obviously the "breeder" didn't dedicate any time at all to flavor.

If they ever reintroduce GMO tomatoes or other vegetables, I think there will be a stampede of people getting into home gardening!

George