Welcome. I am Alice Pham. For thirty-one years I taught botany and plant physiology, and since retiring in 1996 I have been able to do what I always told my students to do and never had time for myself: run a proper trial in my own back yard. This year the subject was heirloom tomatoes, which is to say open-pollinated varieties that have been passed down and maintained for decades, some of them for more than a century, as opposed to the modern F1 hybrids in the supermarket.

I make no claim that this is science. It is one garden, one season, two plants per variety, and one palate (well, three; my husband and our neighbor's boy were the other two judges, and they did not always agree with me). But I kept careful records, and the differences between varieties were far larger than I expected. I have put everything here in the hope that it is useful to someone else choosing seed for next spring. I was, frankly, delighted by most of it.

• Varieties: 24, two plants of each, 48 plants total, from seed I ordered over the winter or was given by fellow members of a seed exchange.
• Seed started March 20 indoors under two 4-foot shop lights; potted up once into 4-inch pots; hardened off for ten days; transplanted May 15 into the garden, 3 feet apart in rows 4 feet apart. Soil is a heavy clay loam that has had compost added every fall since 1988. pH 6.6.
• Culture: all plants caged (concrete reinforcing wire), mulched with straw in June, watered by soaker hose during the dry spell in July and August. No fungicide, no insecticide. A single side dressing of compost at first flowering. I pruned nothing, in order to see each variety's natural habit.
• Yield is the total weight of ripe, usable fruit from both plants, divided by two, weighed on a kitchen scale, through September 20. Fruit lost to rot, cracking or birds was noted but not counted.
• Flavor is a 1 to 10 score, averaged across three tasters and at least three tastings of each variety, always fully ripe, always at room temperature, plain and with salt. I concede it is subjective. So is a tomato.
• Disease was scored on the foliage in early September: Low (green to the top), Mod. (lower third defoliated by early blight or Septoria leaf spot) or High (more than half the plant gone). We had early blight (Alternaria solani) and Septoria in every bed by August, which is normal here. No wilt this year.

Sorted by flavor score, best first. Yield is pounds per plant. Days is approximate days from transplant to first ripe fruit in my garden, which ran later than the catalogs promise, as it always does.

Total harvest through September 20: 447 pounds from 48 plants. We ate, canned, dried, froze, sauced and gave away as much as two people can. The neighbors have stopped answering the door.

The dark tomatoes. Cherokee Purple and Black Krim were, between them, the fruit my tasters reached for first every time. The color puts some people off: they ripen to a dusky brown-red with green or olive shoulders, and they look overripe a day before they are. The flavor is rich, low in sharpness, with something almost savory in it. Both are soft and bruise easily, and Black Krim cracks concentrically after rain. Neither will ever be sold in a supermarket, which is exactly why we grow them.

The pinks. Brandywine, German Johnson and Mortgage Lifter are all large, pink-fleshed beefsteaks in the same family of flavor. Brandywine is the finest and the fussiest: potato-leaf foliage, late, modest yield, and the fruit is ugly. German Johnson gave me a third more fruit with flavor I could barely tell apart. Mortgage Lifter is sweeter and blander, but it is the one to grow for the sheer size of a single slice on a sandwich.

A word about "potato-leaf." Several varieties (Brandywine, Stupice) have smooth-edged leaves that look like potato foliage rather than the usual cut and toothed tomato leaf. It is simply a recessive leaf trait; it says nothing about flavor. But it is useful: if a potato-leaf variety comes up regular-leaf from your saved seed, you know it crossed.

The disease scores tracked foliage density more than anything. The wispy-leaved types (Anna Russian, Opalka) look terrible by August and it hardly affects the fruit. The heavily-foliaged, smaller-fruited types held up best. Eva Purple Ball was the exception in every good way: a large-ish fruit on a plant that was still green to the top on September 20.

Blossom end rot showed up on the paste types in July, as it usually does. It is not a disease but a calcium deficiency in the fruit, nearly always caused by uneven watering rather than a shortage of calcium in the soil. The soaker hose and straw mulch stopped it in later clusters.

The whole point of an open-pollinated variety is that you can save its seed and get the same plant next year. Tomato seed is easy to save if you do one thing that seems odd: let it rot a little. Each seed is wrapped in a gel sac that contains germination inhibitors. In nature a fallen tomato ferments on the ground and the sac dissolves. We copy that in a jar.

1. Choose fully ripe, even overripe, fruit from your best plant of the variety. Not the biggest fruit necessarily; the truest to type.
2. Cut the tomato across the middle and squeeze the seeds and gel into a small jar or a paper cup. Add a tablespoon or two of water if there is not much juice. Label the jar. Label the jar. Every year I think I will remember, and every year I do not.
3. Cover loosely (a paper towel with a rubber band keeps the fruit flies out) and leave it at room temperature for two to four days. It will smell. A film of white or gray mold will form on top. That is what you want. Stir it once a day if you think of it.
4. When the good seeds have sunk to the bottom (three days is typical in a warm kitchen), pour off the mold, pulp and any floating seeds. Floaters are hollow or immature. Add water, swirl, pour off, and repeat until the water runs clear and the seeds are clean.
5. Tip the seeds into a fine strainer, rinse under the tap, and spread them on a labeled paper plate or coffee filter. Not a paper towel; they glue themselves to it. Not a plastic plate; they take a week longer to dry.
6. Dry for a week or two out of the sun, stirring them apart with a finger every day or so, until they are completely dry and no longer stick together. Then into a labeled envelope, and the envelopes into a jar with a lid, in a cool, dry, dark place. Properly dried tomato seed stays viable for five years or more.

Don't ferment too long. Past four or five days in a warm room the seeds can begin to sprout in the jar, and then they are lost. Two to three days is enough.

On crossing. Tomatoes are mostly self-pollinating; the pollen usually falls on the stigma inside the closed flower before a bee ever arrives. But it is not perfect. Potato-leaf varieties and some of the large beefsteaks have flowers whose stigma sticks out past the anthers, and those cross more often. For pure seed, separate varieties by 25 feet or more or, for the ones you really care about, slip a small bag of spun polyester over a flower cluster before it opens and take it off once fruit has set. Mark that truss with a bit of yarn and save seed from it alone. Most home gardeners, myself included, accept a small chance of an accidental cross as the price of a small yard. Sometimes the accident is an improvement.

Keepers, from my own saved seed: Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Aunt Ruby's German Green, Kellogg's Breakfast, German Johnson, Green Zebra, Stupice, Eva Purple Ball, Riesentraube, Amish Paste and Costoluto Genovese. Brandywine too, because one cannot not grow Brandywine, but only two plants and in the best spot.

Dropped: Yellow Pear (the neighbor's boy has the seed and my blessing), San Marzano and Principe Borghese (Amish Paste does everything they do and tastes better fresh), Great White, Big Rainbow (Pineapple is the better bicolor) and Mortgage Lifter, reluctantly.

New for the year 2000 trial, twelve varieties I have never grown, all from the seed exchange: Hillbilly, Striped German, Marvel Stripe, Thessaloniki, Box Car Willie, Red Pear, Nebraska Wedding, Wapsipinicon Peach, Zapotec Pleated, Jaune Flammee, Tigerella and a currant tomato whose name I cannot read on the packet. If the trial gets any bigger my husband has threatened to move to the garage. He may be serious.

I will also try a proper fungicide-free comparison of mulches (straw versus black plastic versus nothing) on the Septoria, since this year's straw beds were noticeably cleaner and I would like to know whether that was the mulch or the row.

If you grew any of these varieties this year and your results were different, I would sincerely like to hear about it. One garden is one garden.