Twenty-two tomatoes

the present volume is offered to the public as a manual or guide to assist in the selection of varieties, rather than as a treatise on cultivation.

Worth knowing before you open it. There is very little here about how to grow anything, because Burr assumed you could already read that elsewhere. It is a reference for telling one plant from another, and it is still the best one for the period.

in order to obtain some comparatively unimportant particular with regard to the foliage, flower, fruit, or seed, of some obscure and almost unknown plant, it has been found necessary to import the seed or root; to plant, to till, to watch, and wait an entire season.

This is a description of a variety trial, run by one man without funding, a decade before the agricultural experiment stations existed. It is also why the descriptions can be trusted: where two catalogues disagreed about a name, he grew both and looked.

It is not, however, presumed that the list is complete, as many varieties, perhaps of much excellence, are comparatively local: never having been described, they are, of course, little known.

Burr is saying that the local, unnamed, family-kept varieties never reached him — which means the real 1863 diversity was larger than his eleven hundred, and any loss calculated against his total understates it. It also means his book cannot be used as a closed list, and anyone quoting it as one is quoting past the author.

a timely knowledge of that which is inferior, or absolutely worthless, is often as advantageous as a knowledge of that which is of positive superiority.

The reason his lists can be counted at all. A catalogue that only recorded the good varieties would tell you nothing about how many existed — and it is the honest note in a book written when every other source on varieties was a seed merchant with stock to move.

the seeds are lens-shaped, yellowish-white, or pale-gray,--twenty-one thousand are contained in an ounce, and they retain their vitality five years.

Tomato seed stored cool and dry is still generally reckoned good for four to six years, so Burr's figure needs no correction. The caveat is only that viability falls gradually rather than expiring, and a germination test on a saucer costs nothing.

the plants may be set in the open ground where they are to remain, and should be three feet apart in each direction

Three feet each way for an unstaked plant, which is what the 1912 table also gives for field tomatoes fifty years later, and roughly what Solomon gives for growing them without irrigation. The tighter modern spacing assumes a stake, a determinate variety, and a hose.

For a long period, it was very little used; and the peculiar, specific term, lycopersicum, derived from lykos, “wolf,” and persicon, “a peach” (referring to the beautiful but deceptive appearance of the fruit), more than intimates the kind of estimation in which it was held.

Burr is recording, in 1863, that the tomato had only recently become respectable — he notes its use had increased fourfold in twenty years. The etymology he gives is the standard one. Read it as a reminder that the contents of an ordinary garden are far less fixed than they feel from inside any one decade.