‘I Can Grow ‘Em, but I Can’t Spell ‘Em’ : Vista Fruit Grower’s Exotic Wares Tickle Taste Buds

Harry Stillman has a problem with his watermelons. They are too large.

“Give a man a hernia just lifting one,” he complains.

The seeds for the oversized melons, which lie like combat-camouflaged mounds in Stillman’s yard, come from Botswana, Africa. Like everything else in Stillman’s garden, the Botswana melons are special. They can “withstand anything--disease, drought, anything--except maybe an army tank,” he said.

Stillman, 71, retired from a high-pressure job as a network broadcast engineer in Los Angeles and moved to Vista about nine years ago to become a gentleman farmer on his three-acre mini-estate.

Everything on the place is “exotic” because Stillman feels that raising avocadoes or citrus would be boring “and probably wouldn’t pay the water bill.”

He and other members of the California Rare Fruit Growers Assn. are convinced that they have the ultimate answer for preservation of the small farmer in North County: the raising of exotic fruits and vegetables that bring high prices instead of competing with large landowners by raising traditional Southern California produce.

Standing beneath his ice cream banana tree--one of three banana plants that hang heavy with fruit despite agronomists’ contentions that bananas don’t do well here--Stillman expounded on his favorite subject of keeping North County green by helping large and small growers to prosper.

“You have to be inventive, to try new things,” is his advice to small growers. For instance, there’s the black sapote, which is of the persimmon family but tastes like chocolate mousse; the white sapote, which tastes like vanilla custard; the pomelo, presumed to be “granddaddy of the grapefruit,” but sweeter; the cherimoya, which looks like a small hand grenade and has a pineapple custard flavor; the Chinese jujube, which tastes like an apple at one stage, then mellows and browns to look and taste like a date, and dozens of others that Stillman has grown and marketed.

“I can grow ‘em, but I can’t spell ‘em,” he apologized.

One favorite is a Tahitian squash “which the women fight over” because “it doesn’t taste like a squash, it tastes like cake when it is baked just right with a little cinnamon and orange peel.” Even Stillman, who eats domestic squash only “with a gun to my head,” thinks it is delicious.

Exotic-plant growers in North County get together once a month to talk shop and to brag about their newest acquisitions. Each member of the group “brings something for refreshments that a millionaire couldn’t buy.” Stillman’s contribution is often what he has humbly named “Harry Stillman’s Famous Fruit Salad.” Its contents sometimes leave the other growers guessing.

The outlet for his exotic wares is the Vista farmers market, a Saturday-morning event held behind the Vista City Hall. As many as 40 growers show up, including others that vie with Stillman in raising subtropical fruits and vegetables.

The market opens at 8 a.m. and by 9 the best of his crop is gone. One reason Stillman often chalks up an early sellout is the influx of Southeast Asians to the area, homesick for their native foods and overjoyed to find them grown in Vista.

“More than once I’ve gotten mobbed,” he said, “and sometimes someone will shout, ‘I’ll take it all!’ ”

His customers come from everywhere. Once, after a frantic call from Hollywood late last fall, Stillman sold his entire supply of Hawaiian-style passion fruit.

The purchasers were a young couple, both rock singers, who were giving a party. “She said she wanted all the passion fruit I had and that price was no object,” he recalled. “I didn’t ask what kind of a party it was.”

Stillman’s latest “find” is his favorite. From Ben-Gurion University in Israel’s Negev Desert he has obtained two packets of seeds for a “30-day shelf-life tomato.”

The common fruit, with the added ability to stay ripe without rotting, was created by a bit of gene surgery at the Israeli research laboratories, he explained. “It could revolutionize the tomato-growing industry.”

Such tomatoes could be ripened on the vine, picked at their peak, then shipped to Afghanistan or Alaska or anywhere, he said. “No more picking green tomatoes that taste like cardboard,” Stillman crowed. “Now you can ship vine-ripened tomatoes almost anywhere in the world without spoilage.”

The new long-lived variety also would cut down drastically on tomato spoilage, which he estimated “nears 30% of a crop” with present varieties of the fruit.

“Everything else in these tomatoes is the same. The color, the texture, the taste. Only the shelf life is different,” he explained, conceding that his statements are based on hearsay because he has yet to sample one of the genetically jiggered tomatoes.

Stillman has several ripening tomatoes on an ordinary-looking tomato plant and has plucked one and begun his personal countdown of its staying power.

Stillman was more than a little interested to know if the DNA research that lengthened the life of tomatoes also applied to humans.

“They told me that it probably did,” Stillman said, “but added that I was about 70 years too early for a definite answer.”