While regular tomatoes are grown for appearance and graded into specific sizes, heirloom tomatoes are grown for flavor. Heirlooms have a look only a mother could love, and are the tomatoes that your grandmother and great-grandmother probably ate.
They are lumpy, sometimes have splits or cracks in the skin, color striations, and their thin skin is soft to the touch when ripe. They can be a riot of colors and sizes: green striped, deep purply to dark brown, bright yellow and orange, or any mix of colors in between.
