Hyloom Tomatoes: The Best of Both Worlds

Above: Johnny's-bred hyloom tomato varieties 'Harvest Moon', 'Woodstock', and 'Strawberry Fields'.

By Nathaniel Gorlin-Crenshaw, Product Manager, Johnny's Selected Seeds

For many years while trialing tomatoes we had requests for something that looks and tastes like a cherished heirloom, but with the kind of plant vigor, disease resistance, and fruit productivity that makes growing them well worthwhile. This led to a long list of contenders but no winners for quite some time. In 2015 we added the first “hyloom” tomato varieties that captured true heirloom eating quality coupled with the production and durability of a hybrid plant. Since then, we have continued to expand our offerings, and we are proud to offer one of the widest arrays of hyloom tomato varieties of any seed company, all of which have been specially selected at our Research Farm.

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Heirloom vs. Hybrid Tomatoes

'Cherokee Purple' (L) & 'Marnero' (R)

Heirloom tomatoes are open-pollinated varieties whose seed lines have been maintained and passed down by gardeners, farmers, and families over generations—many have long, storied histories and a strong cultural significance for the people who saved the seed. Beyond their cultural heritage, heirlooms are often prized for traits such as appearance, fragrance, and flavor, but they can be challenging to grow—especially for the commercial grower who needs reliable production and quality. Heirloom tomatoes tend to be more susceptible to certain diseases; can be less productive than modern hybrids; and can commonly experience issues with their fruit cracking, splitting, and “catfacing.”

'Striped German' (L) & 'Margold' (R)

Hybrid (F1) tomatoes are the offspring of a cross between two genetically distinct parent lines. Hybrid varieties are typically selected for traits such as disease resistance, plant vigor, fruit quality, yield, and climate adaptability. An (F1) hybrid refers to “first filial,” or first-generation offspring of the cross. “Hybrid vigor” is a term used to describe the improved traits often found in hybrid varieties, such as improved yield and plant health. Unlike heirloom varieties, seeds saved from an F1 hybrid will not produce plants with characteristics equivalent to the F1 hybrid.

Our former Product Manager Pete Zuck coined the term Hyloom to describe a hybrid variety that expresses both the improved agronomic qualities of a modern hybrid, along with many of the desirable qualities of an heirloom. Hylooms offer the best of both worlds, providing the rich flavors and textures, and beautiful appearance of an heirloom variety, while also offering the improved productivity, reliable uniformity, and enhanced disease resistance of a hybrid.

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Disease Resistance

Video about 'Hot Streak' hyloom tomato variety

Video: 'Hot Streak' is a striped, hybrid tomato with vivid color, nice size, and a professional disease package. It has resistance to leaf mold, gray leaf spot (or Stemphylium), Fusarium race 2, Fusarium crown rot, tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV), Verticillium, and tomato mosaic virus (TMV).

One of the most notable improvements of hyloom tomatoes over their heirloom counterparts is disease resistance. Disease is one of the greatest challenges to growing heirloom varieties, and can make their performance highly variable from year-to-year. Whether you're growing to sell or for your own use, there are few experiences more disappointing than putting the effort into growing a variety that yields an unpredictable and meager return.

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Greenhouse Performers

Video about 'Ginfiz' and 'Margold' hyloom tomatoes

Video: Compare two greenhouse beefsteak hyloom varieties, 'Margold' and 'GinFiz'.

Currently, all heirloom varieties were, given their history, selected to grow in a field or a garden plot, and not in a modern greenhouse or high tunnel. This means that many of the specific needs and pressures of greenhouse growing are not met by these varieties—that's not what they were selected for! Many hylooms, on the other hand, have been specifically bred for greenhouse production. They have consistent plant habits that are better for pruning and trellising, predictable fruit production that takes better advantage of greenhouse growing techniques, resistance to greenhouse-specific disease issues, and plants that better handle the conditions and stresses specific to greenhouse growing. All of this makes hyloom varieties much more suitable for greenhouse, high tunnel, or hoophouse growing than true heirlooms.

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French Heritage Collection: Where it all Started

Our first hyloom tomato varieties appeared in the Johnny's 2015 and 2016 catalogs.

'Marnero', 'Marbonne', and 'Margold': these were the first hylooms to make it into our catalog, back in 2015. After years of trialing, these were the first hybrid varieties that we found to have both the classic good looks of an heirloom, with unique and eye-catching fruit colors and shapes, as well as exceptional flavor, balanced in sweetness and acidity, with a complex, layered aroma and the soft flesh that provides the texture for which heirlooms are revered. Today, we still offer these same French Heritage Collection varieties that we launched back in 2015, and we have expanded beyond to an even wider array of hyloom varieties over the last 10 years.

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Johnny’s-Bred Hylooms

In the intervening decade since the introduction of the French Heritage Collection, Johnny’s Breeding Team has worked to expand our lineup with more high-performing hyloom varieties.

Ours is a classical plant breeding program. Classical breeding as a discipline is both an art and science that has existed for over 100 years, though many of the techniques it uses are far older than that. The classical breeding method starts with a large plant population that has a wider range of variability. The Breeding Team selects plants that show desirable characteristics from this larger population, harvests the seed produced by those plants, and then observes the next generation in the following year. The key is selection; the standard of your selection determines the quality of the breeding. With careful selection, our Breeding Team creates “parent lines” that it uses to cross-breed into a new, hybrid variety. The cross-breeding is painstaking, as it involves hand pollinating individual flowers. The resulting seed from this cross-pollination, once planted, grows into the hybrid variety that gardeners know by name. It takes, on average, a minimum of 8 years to bring a concept to market as a new variety.

Flavor is always at the forefront of our breeding efforts. Additionally, we select for reliability, early maturity, direct market appeal, yield, labor savings, and disease resistance—especially late blight, early blight, Septoria leaf spot, and leaf mold. Our hyloom varieties are selected for performance: both in our northern growing environment of Maine, as well as with trusted commercial grower-partners around the country in offsite trials before any commercial release.

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Learn More

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