Heirloom tomatoes are awesome, right? The fruits, bursting with tons of real flavor, come in more shapes and sizes and colors than a gardener or a cook knows what to do with. Plant just a few and you’ll be blessed with a bountiful harvest. If you’re lucky. Heirlooms are known to be a bit finicky. They are prone to disease, especially those attacking the root zone. Coddling is required for most heirlooms. However, Bumper crop tomatoes are a wonderful alternative.

Grafting hybrid tomatoes

I’m throwing out a blanket statement here by saying that hybrid varieties are tougher. Their roots can handle disease. Give them some unforeseen, unsavory conditions and they will muscle through it. Heirlooms, not so easily. And here’s another blanket statement: hybrids lack that fullness of flavor that oozes through the heirloom.

Last June I mentioned the Mighty Mato, a tomato that combines the roots of a hybrid variety with the upper portion of an heirloom. And they are literally combined together by grafting the plant equivalent of gluing one portion onto the other and having it meld into one plant. The hybrid vigor of the roots combined with the heirlooms taste and bountifulness is supposed to give you more, bigger, and better yields on a plant that is (relatively) free of disease.

How did my Mighty Matoes do last year? It was an overall horrible season for tomatoes (at least in my garden), and to say the Mighty Mato performed less horribly than the rest of the crop is really the best I can say.

Bumper Crop Tomatoes

Burpee Home Gardens is offering its own line of grafted tomatoes under the name Bumper Crop. As with the Mighty Mato, Bumper Crop’s combination of a hybrid root stock with an heirloom scion promises higher yields, disease resistance, and, of course, tasty tomatoes. And the six varieties in this Bumper Crop line are heirlooms that practically any recent restaurant-goer recognizes:

• Black Krim
• Brandywine Pink
• Brandywine Red
• Big Rainbow
• Mortgage Lifter
• San Marzano

These varieties are being offered on a trial basis for garden writers and the horticulture industry, and you’ll be able to find them in garden centers and nurseries for Spring 2013.

I hope to get my hands on some of these grafted varieties, along with the non-grafted versions so I can do a comparison. If all goes as they promise, I should be canning up a storm in five short months.