Expert Advice! Patti Moreno, nationally known as the Garden Girl, provides how-to help on growing heirloom tomatoes and other vintage vegetables. She also offers sage advice on organic/sustainable practices for going green in your garden.

Just a Taste of What's Inside: Here, you'll find expert, how-to help for growing lots of your garden favorites. Enjoy the satisfaction from seeing your crops go from the garden patch to dinner plate:

• Strawberries all summer long
• Pumpkins good enough to eat
• Tasty muskmelons and sweet carrots
• Edible flowers to sparkle up a salad
• And simple recipes, too!

• how to prune tomatoes
• keeping your harvest fresh
• attracting good bugs
• keep out the biggest pests: deer
• and much, much more

Heirloom Tomatoes

Word of mouth is always a great advertisement. I first ventured into heirloom tomatoes after hearing for the umpteenth time how swell 'Brandywine' was. If gardeners from New Jersey to California were extolling its virtues, then, I thought, it must be worth growing. And it was. Since that first 'Brandywine', I've grown 'Persimmon', 'Old Flame', 'Georgia Streak', and 'German', among others. And while I'd rather fight than give up my favorite hybrids, heirlooms now make up the lion's share of my tomato crop.

Most of us cut our gardener's teeth on hybrid tomatoes, those with names like 'Jet Star' or 'Better Boy'. With few exceptions, our chosen varieties were red, round, and -- for the most part -- big. The bigger, the better. There's always been another side to the tomato world, though, a side where the fruits of the vine can be fluted, scalloped, flattened, lobed, or shaped like hearts or strawberries. When ripe, they might be white, pink, red, orange, yellow, gold, purple, chocolate brown, blackish red, green, or striped. In addition to the typical tomato foliage, there are potato-leaf types; wispy, fernlike leaves; and puckered, rugose leaves. And the flavors range from sweet to tart, mild to strong, perfumed and fruity to dark and smoky.