Good planting techniques are the same for heirlooms as for modern plants of the same types. Consult any good general gardening book or ask our experts at Bachman's about the ones you want to plant. The only technique you might want to learn is how to save the seeds of your heirloom plants. While most of them do not have bred-in resistance to diseases as some modern hybrids do, they are still around because they have a great deal of natural resistance. By saving seeds from the survivors, our ancestors encouraged that resistance.
Heirloom vegetables come in far more varieties than modern hybrids do.
Many people were saving them and they saved for different tastes and uses. There are large tomatoes, small tomatoes, sweet ones, tart ones, slicers, juicers and paste tomatoes that come in many different colors. Modern hybrids have been bred to grow in a wide variety of climates and soils. While they do reasonably well most everywhere, the heirlooms often do better in specific situations. If the heirloom tomato you choose has been grown in Minnesota for several generations, it will have become selectively adapted to our climate, soil, diseases and insects.