Brandywine Tomato
Solanum lycopersicum 'Brandywine'
The tomato that ruined every other tomato for you and then made you work for it.
If you've ever eaten a real Brandywine, you understand why people do irrational things in their gardens. That flavor — deep, sweet, almost wine-like, the thing that makes a grocery store tomato taste like a wet napkin by comparison — is real. It exists. You didn't imagine it. The problem is everything else about this plant.
It's an indeterminate heirloom that grows six feet tall and produces fruit so heavy it will snap its own branches if you don't support it with something that looks like scaffolding. It cracks in rain. It sunscalds in heat. It gets blossom end rot if you water wrong and early blight if you breathe on it. The yield is low compared to any hybrid, and half the fruit will be ugly. You will eat the ugly ones and they will be transcendent.
This is the tomato for people who have accepted that gardening is not about efficiency. It's about standing in your yard in August, eating something warm and imperfect off the vine, and understanding why your grandparents did this.
Editor's note: Yield per square foot: terrible. Taste per bite: the reason you garden.