Today we find out about a very common garden plant that people love to eat.


MELISSA KING: Commercial tomatoes have been developed for tougher skins, uniformity of shape, colour and ripening, and improved storage and transport life. So it's not surprising that they're often lacking in flavour.

This focus on commercial traits has seen the disappearance of many of the good old traditional varieties.

Thankfully seed savers networks and keen gardeners are rediscovering the wealth of heirloom tomatoes.

Heirlooms are garden-worthy varieties, which have stood the test of time.

They have been selected and saved by generations of gardeners, and offer some of the best tasting and best yielding varieties. Garden trials here in Australia have shown that they're easy to grow, reliably productive and their pest and disease resistance is often just as good as modern varieties.

Growing a diversity of tomatoes offers the best chance for conservation of these unique varieties, and unlike hybrids, which don't produce the same plants from seed, the seed of heirloom varieties can be collected and saved year after year.

DAVID CAVAGNARO: Few of us realise that all the wonderful foods that we eat, we wouldn't have today if it weren't for the efforts of hundreds of thousands of backyard farmers and gardeners over centuries of time, growing and preserving the incredible genetic diversity that goes into the food supply we have today.

And so if we don't continue to do that, if we don't continue to save the genetic diversity that is the basis of all of our foods, we will find that in the future we will just have far less wonderful varieties and far less adequate food supply.

MELISSA KING: Now, tomatoes vary in size, from these tiny pea-sized fruits of wild tomatoes right through to the bigger beafsteak varieties like this one which is called Black Krim, has a lovely charcoal-coloured flesh.

Now, some varieties have a real 'bite' to them, whereas others are deliciously sweet.

DAVID CAVAGNARO: There's nothing like growing your own food, in general. I mean it makes the garden a very much more interesting place.

Many of these varieties are beautiful to look at, and nothing more than tomatoes that give you that wonderful smell of summer and the incredible taste of a vine-ripened tomato in the warm sun of summer.