Heirloom vines rising, arugula’s wild ride

Peaking

Tomato plants: You can go to any home improvement store and pick up a flat of Early Girl and Sweet 100 seedlings, but for tomatoes with a heritage, you’ll have to look a little harder. At Jimmy Williams’ HayGround stand at the Hollywood and Santa Monica farmers markets, you can find St. Pierre from France, Chocolate Amazon from the Ukraine and the tomato he calls Goose Creek, which he says is a family heirloom passed down from his Gullah grandmother in Charleston, S.C. Barbara Spencer at Windrose Farm is selling her terrific tomato plants again too. Check out her Double Rich Red, a Seeds of Change variety that promises as much vitamin C as an orange, as well as classic high-flavor tomatoes such as Brandywine Pink and Cherokee Purple.

$3 per small plant, HayGround and Windrose Farm

Wild arugula: It’s getting so that garden variety arugula is almost as common as romaine. You can even find it cut and washed in bags. Its peppery taste (I think there’s even a hint of bacon) is everywhere. Wild arugula ups the ante. It’s not truly wild, of course, but a domesticated variety from Italy. Still, that “wild” tag could refer to its flavor. Its frilly leaves are sweeter and more pungent as well as more complex than regular arugula. The stems are a little tougher too, but in a good way – they promise snap in a salad and allow brief cooking without turning to mush.

$1 per bunch, Coleman Family Farm

Just in

Grape tomatoes: For the most part, great tomatoes are still a couple of weeks away, so thank goodness for grape tomatoes. Because of their small size and high sugar content, they tend to taste riper earlier than almost any other tomato. Introduced from Taiwan 10 years ago, they have proliferated like mad. Where there was once just a single variety (called Santa, it’s still around and still good), there’s now a rainbow of colors and shapes. They’re best used split in half in salads, so you can still appreciate the burst of flavor from their thick skins.

$2 per basket, various vendors

 russ.parsons@latimes.com