Truemors
In the early 1990s, Kim got the bug for serious organic gardening. The house we lived in at the time had a lovely spot in the back where a small but dedicated garden could take place. She dug it out, enriched the soil with our own compost, added nutrients as necessary, fought back pests without insecticides... and ended up with vegetables that changed how we thought about food.
I've never forgotten how exquisite a really ripe tomato tastes. We're eagerly awaiting these, an heirloom variety called Purple Cherokee.
And yes, tomatoes ARE a fruit. And if you'd ever walked out to a tomato plant, gently palpated each of the red, gold, purple, pink or orange globes to see which one was well and truly ripe... you'd never again doubt that.
For the neophyte to home-grown tomatoes, start with three varieties:
"Early Girl"—only a middling-quality tomato, but easy to grow and great in salads and sauces, and a big producer.
"Pink Brandywine"—an heirloom variety (a "pedigree" tomato, if you will, not hybridized for factory cultivation) maintained by the Pennsylvania Amish community. Big, voluptuous, and pink as a watermelon, the Pink Brandywine will change the way you think about tomatoes forever. They tend to have deeply creased exteriors and sometimes look odd, by the standards of your grocery-store styrofoam globe, but these are magnificent.
"Sweet 100"—the definitive home-and-garden cherry tomato. Named for their ability to produce grape-like clusters of fruit, the Sweet 100 is often sweeter than commercially grown grapes. When my daughters were little, they'd spend summers laughing and dashing through the sprinklers in the back yard, stopping on occasion to pop a Sweet 100 into their mouths. There's a reason so many cultures consider paradise to be a world of innocence, of fountains, and of gardens.
