A few years ago, when I had just built my very first film greenhouse (hoop house), I completely ran out of time to grow my own seedlings. So, I bought tomato seedlings at the local market. I bought them from different places, from various questionable old ladies. Unsurprisingly, by mid-July, the tomatoes in my brand-new greenhouse started getting heavily sick. Leaf Mold (Cladosporium) and other brown leaf spots crept in from every corner of the greenhouse. Every “babushka” managed to contribute her own special, unique disease to my garden.

Despite this, I actually managed to harvest a very decent crop of tomatoes that year. I scratched my head and figured: if I harvested over 10 buckets of tomatoes from sick bushes, I’d probably get 20 buckets from healthy ones! What a massive increase in yield that would be!

But how do I keep the plants healthy without using heavy chemicals? I only use chemical fungicides in extreme cases, and I always stick to the most “understandable” treatments—the ones where reading the ingredients gives you a clear idea of the actual impact on human health… But I digress.

So, how do I keep tomato plants healthy? The solution was right there on the surface! F1 Hybrids! After all, they are genetically bred to be resistant to this disease, that disease, and everything else in between. It was decided! That year, I planted my greenhouse almost exclusively with F1 hybrid tomatoes.

It was awful.

There was practically nothing to eat that year. If it weren’t for a few bushes of some black/dark heirloom tomatoes I threw in, I might as well have been buying my tomatoes at the supermarket.

Yes, there were quite a lot of tomatoes… Yes, they were highly transportable, firm, and incredibly disease-resistant… And most importantly, they had an exceptionally long shelf life. That specific quality came in incredibly handy, because they sat on our counter all the way until November, when we successfully threw them in the trash.

Since then, my attitude towards commercial hybrids has cooled, to put it mildly. After that incident, the packets of hybrid seeds I had carefully collected over the winter were banished to the deepest bottom of the deepest box with my scariest seeds, forgotten forever.

That “forever,” however, only lasted until the next season. I decided that it’s wise to plant just two or three hybrid bushes every year, just as an insurance policy. After all, if the heirlooms fail, you can always turn the hard hybrids into ketchup.