You say tomato. Me too.
Tomatoes from supermarkets are red. Tomatoes from farmers markets are redder, have more flavor and a certain bruised grandeur. But only a tomato picked and carried straight to the kitchen explains the fruit’s exalted status in our gardens.
The experience starts with the whiff of astringent perfume from a freshly clipped stem. The tomato itself is voluptuous, warm in hand, so drunk on sunshine that it doesn’t know it’s been picked yet. Rinsed, sliced and tasted within minutes of picking, it’s meaty, almost salty, with a vibrant acid fillip. It doesn’t need salt, or pepper, or oil or vinegar. It’s a meal in itself.
And it only takes 90 days to prepare.
This is about the first 89.
It begins today, as April is the start of tomato-planting season in Southern California. You don’t need a garden. Among the dozens of tomato varieties to be found in any good garden center, and the 200 varieties of seedlings available this weekend at the yearly sale Tomatomania in Encino, are plants perfect for growing on balconies, front porches and window ledges.
All a gardener needs is a place in the sun, water and to know a thing or two about the plant itself. Learning what it needs starts with where it came from. Names like ‘Roma,’ ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and ‘Aussie’ make tomatoes sound universal, as if they come from all over, including Italy, the Midwest, the Outback. In fact, tomatoes come from Peru, maybe Ecuador, too. At home in the tropics, they can grow year-round and can become big, mean and green. However, ever since Cortes took them back to Europe in the 1500s, for most of the temperate world, they have become a strictly summer crop.
It’s tempting to try growing them year-round in Los Angeles, but it doesn’t work, because the plants stop growing and blight sets in when nighttime temperatures drop below 50 degrees. When the first roses of April bloom, it’s time to put them in.
Jonathan Roberts’ 2001 book “The Origins of Fruit & Vegetables” (Universe, $22.50) contains a nicely told history of how the name evolved from the Aztec tomatl to Spanish tomate to the French pomme d’amour and English “love apple.” Although the plant eventually spread all over Europe, success was not instant. Botanists placed it in the nightshade family, a clan then best known for belladonna. To emphasize its potentially poisonous nature, they named it Solanum lycopersicum -- solanum for nightshade and lycopersicum meaning “wolf’s peach.”
As a dog owner who has seen her terrier intently strip a vine of plum tomatoes, eating every last one, I’m tempted to speculate that 16th century botanists might have observed wolves doing much the same. By the 18th century, people were eating them, and the botanical name was changed to Lycopersicum esculentum, meaning “edible wolf’s peach.”
Once people started eating tomatoes, for some reason they acquired an unlikely reputation as aphrodisiacs. The plants have no particular Viagra-like properties on people; however, they themselves have interesting sex lives. Tomatoes do not need pollinating by bees or another plant to reproduce. They are self-fruitful.
Love apples, indeed.
Just how much love a tomato flower gets, where and from what is behind whether its seedling is considered heirloom or hybrid. Heirlooms, explains Tim Hartz, a cooperative extension specialist advising tomato growers out of UC Davis, are the results of decades of propagation of a certain plant, breeding it to the point that its genes are incapable of throwing out surprising shapes, sizes, colors or flavors. In other words, heirlooms are inbreds.
So as tomatoes spread across Europe and around the world, different cultures bred the fruit in pursuit of different qualities. Lycopersicum esculentum became a huge school of green tomatoes, striped ones, red ones, yellow, brown, round, pear-shaped. Show botanists a tomato, and they’ll tell you how you cook it. The Italians, for example, selected and propagated ‘Roma’ type tomatoes for high meat and relatively low water content, so the fruit would cook and can well.
“Hybrid” is a term usually used for plants that are the result of more modern breeding programs, in which the tomato hasn’t been self-fruitful. The pollen of one plant has been transferred to another to create a new variety. The seedlings of these crossbreeds might revert back to the characteristics of either parent. Modern seed companies gave the hybrid a bad name through their conveyor-belt-friendly, tasteless supermarket tomatoes. However, they also developed excellent hybrids for the home garden, such as ‘Early Girl,’ that gave disease resistance and early fruit to old varieties.
Between improved hybrids and the heirlooms emerging out of the seed-saving movement, choosing which tomato plant to grow can now induce option paralysis. The solution: Fight plenty with plenty. Don’t grow one type of tomato, but several. Can’t choose? Don’t.
At Tomatomania, staff rattle off the names of varieties so fast, they sound like Disney rides: ‘Cherokee Chocolate,’ ‘Bloody Butcher,’ ‘Green Velvet,’ ‘Micado-Violettor.’
Forget names. Remember the qualities you want, starting with color. Tomatoes can be green, yellow, orange, pink, red and brown. The color doesn’t affect the flavor, but yellow and orange ones do carry a nice beta carotene kick.
The pink ones are often fragile and can split and scar on the vine. It’s called “catfacing,” and it’s a common flaw. “It’s cosmetic,” says Scott Daigre, a landscaper and organizer of Tomatomania. “The blemishes are all part of the heirloom world.”
Size only matters on two counts. If you’re growing in containers, it’s a good idea to plant cherry tomatoes. Second, it affects how you choose to support the plant. Hartz recommends the tomato cage, which means you don’t have to trim the vine and can let it become bushy. More bush means more fruit, which the cage supports better.
Timing matters, too. Gourmet magazine routinely runs tomato sections in its August editions to help people deal with tomato gluts. Garrison Keillor has a nice Lake Wobegon gag about gardeners abandoning bushels of tomatoes on each other’s porches. The take-home lesson is: You don’t want all the fruit to ripen at once.
To avoid this, when buying seeds or seedlings, check the ripening time on the tag. A typical term is 85 to 90 days; a fast one is 60. If you’re planting more than one vine, stagger the planting by two weeks to spread out harvest.
Also check whether plants are identified as “determinate” or “indeterminate.” Determinate vines, such as ‘Roma’ and window-box ‘Roma,’ bear fruit all at once and are prized by the canning industry. Indeterminate ones are better for salad and keep bearing much of the summer. Daigre recommends heirlooms such as the French ‘Jaune Flammee,’ ‘Cherokee Purple,’ ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and the high-yielding ‘Mortgage Lifter’ along with hybrids such as ‘Early Girl’ and ‘Better Boy’ as long-serving, flavorful indeterminates. For the foie gras of the tomato table, go to ‘Brandywine’ or ‘Black Krim.’
But a word of warning. If you choose heirlooms for their brimming flavor and beauty, also select disease-resistant modern hybrids as backups. This way, if a common soil fungus gets to the heirlooms, you lose a vine, not a crop.
When planting both types, the trick is to remember you’re planting a tropical plant, not a native. Tomatoes like sunshine, but not desert heat. Above 90 degrees in the day, or below 55 at night, tomatoes want to go home to Peru.
David Diaz, proprietor of Bountiful Gardens in Lake View Terrace, manages to grow tomatoes in ferocious foothill heat. The trick there, he says, is water, well-prepared soil and plenty of mulch.
The best way to learn what tomatoes need is to grow them, and grow enough of them to take a few losses with equanimity. As you taste the first garden tomatoes of the season while everyone else is paying $3 a pound for bruised ones, all the work is suddenly worth it. By summer, dinner is grown.
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How to reap the fruits of the vine
Start seeds in cut-off milk
cartons, seedling pots or flats in sheltered light. Keep moist until they germinate.
Plant seedlings in garden or large pots when they reach about 8 inches tall. Plant at intervals throughout April, May and early June for continuously good-looking plants and fruit to November. Choose a mix of heirloom and hybrid fruit. Make sure at least half of the plants are resistant to fusarium and verticillium wilts. Hybrids usually are.
When preparing beds for tomatoes, improve the soil to a depth of at least a foot with three parts compost to one part native soil. Even for 8-inch seedlings, dig a big hole, 18 inches deep and across, and mix backfill with about a pound of chicken manure. Instead of manure you can dig in a blood and bone vegetable fertilizer, if you don’t have dogs or visiting coyotes that will dig it up.
When you plant the seedling, don’t stake it, but use metal tomato cages. You will not need to trim potentially fruitful suckers off the sides to keep it staked. This will allow it to grow as a bush, producing more fruit that is supported more evenly.
If you can, water with a slow drip soaker system, not with a hose. Regular deep watering, weekly in moderate heat, more often in high summer, will saturate the soil and promote root growth. This will make the plant more wilt resistant. If you water with a hose, treat the plant once a week to an hour’s drip deep water, as you would a sapling.
If you are growing tomatoes in pots, use plastic. It’s not as pretty as terra cotta, but it prevents evaporation and afternoon wilts. Place the pot in half sun, half shade so the roots aren’t boiled in the pot. Once the plant starts to take off, water it twice a day.
Test for ripeness not by color, but by smell and feel. Ripe fruit begins to emit a blowsy tomato smell and becomes voluptuous.
When the plant becomes tired and straggly in late summer, don’t wait for the last fruits. It’s not worth the water. Remove it and move on to successor vines. Save and dry seeds from heirloom plants to start the following year. However, with hybrids, start with new seed or a new plant.
A respectable selection of seeds and seedlings can be found at any good nursery. These have exceptional variety: Tomatomania, Tapia Bros. Farms, 5212 Hayvenhurst Ave., Encino, (323) 363-0844 or e-mail tomatomaniahq@aol.com, Friday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Burkard Nurseries, 690 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 796-4355, heirloom seedlings throughout the season. For seeds, try Renee’s Garden, www.reneesgarden.com, (888) 880-7228; Burpee’s, www.burpee.com, (800) 888-1447; Seeds of Change, www.seedsofchange.com,(888) 762-7333; or Seed Savers, 3076 N. Winn Road, Decorah, IA 52101, (563) 382-5990, www.seedsavers.org.
