Information on Brandywine Tomatoes

Heirloom

• Horticulturalists cross-breed tomatoes to produce hardy, disease-resistant plants that bear perfectly shaped fruit that is easy to harvest and has a long shelf life. Brandywine is an heirloom, or open-pollinated, tomato. This means that you don't crossed-breed it with other types of tomatoes, and seeds collected from the fruit will always produce fruit just like the parent plants. While cross-breeds produce a better-looking tomato that is easier to grow, they often lack the superior flavor or heirlooms.

Advantages

• Outstanding flavor is an important reason to grow Brandywine tomatoes, but it isn't the only reason. If you love large tomatoes, Brandywine is the tomato for you. It produces large, 1 1/2-lb. fruit, and one slice is all you need for a sandwich. Brandywine is an indeterminate tomato, which means that instead of producing a large crop all at once, it produces the crop gradually over a long period of time. This is ideal if you are growing Brandywine for fresh eating.

Disadvantages

• Brandywine vines are large, sprawling plants that take up a lot of space in the garden, and the yield per plant is low when compared to other tomatoes. The plants have no resistance to viral and bacterial diseases and often succumb to disease before they have a chance to produce a crop. The fruit ripens late in the season -- as much as a month later than some varieties -- making it impossible to grow in areas with a short growing season. In addition, Brandywine tomatoes are irregularly shaped and often have many flaws. They ripen unevenly so that fully ripened fruit may have green shoulders, and heavy rains cause cracking and circular cracks around the blossom end.

Grafting

• Gardeners can overcome some of the disadvantages of heirloom tomatoes by grafting Brandywines onto disease-resistant hybrid rootstock. Plants created from grafts have the same resistance to soil-borne bacterial and viral diseases as the rootstock variety, but produce flavorful Brandywine fruit. Sturdy, hybrid rootstock produces more vigorous plants that manage water stress better than Brandywine roots, and some types of rootstock also help Brandywine overcome problems with nematodes.