The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Growing Epic Tomates part two

Episode Date: January 29, 2016

In part two of my conversation with Craig Lehoullier, author or Epic Tomatoes, we focus on tomato variety selection. Craig explains how tomato colours are classified, recommends the best heirlooms for commercial gardeners to grow in each colour category, and explains why it's worth the extra effort to seek out specific varieties from trusted sources.  

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant Podcast and blog wonders what good farming looks like and aims to help farmers and gardeners share insights with each other. At theruminant.ca, you'll find show notes for each episode of the podcast as well as the odd essay, book review, and photo-based blog post. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, I'm at ruminantblog on Twitter, or search The Ruminant on Facebook.

Okay, on with the show. So folks, today's episode features part two of my conversation with author Craig LaHoullier, who wrote the book Epic Tomatoes, but I'd like to start out the episode today with a new segment. I'm calling it the Ruminant Media Roundup and I thought it'd be cool just to highlight some interesting farm-related journalism that's happening all over the place. One type of social journalism or social media that's happening is the Market Gardening Success Group. This is a Facebook page where market gardeners can come to talk shop. I've been really impressed with the discourse that's been happening there,

so if you've got problems you need help with, it's a good page to check out. I think it's invite only. It's a Facebook page, but if you head over to Facebook, Market Gardening Success Group, check it out, and I think you can request an invitation. Also, the latest edition of Small Farm Canada just came out, and it is a great magazine that I have been subscribing to for years. It is relevant to farmers in Canada, America and beyond. And it's just always chock full of really interesting ideas for small scale farmers. I recently spoke with editor Tom Henry about what is in the latest edition. Tom Henry, let's talk about the latest issue. The January,February issue just

came out. What can people expect in the issue? Okay, okay, a few fun things in here. Maybe a little more researchy than we normally are. We've got an interesting article on the heat retention properties of eutectic salts. An economist up in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island did a very thorough research project on using eutectic salts to retain heat in her greenhouse. And they are definitely something that your greenhouse-minded listeners may want to check out. It's more than we want to dive into here, but basically they have sort of 60-plus times the heat retention qualities of water. And these blocks of salt can be set around a greenhouse and really moderate extremes of cold. Another researchy kind of article in the magazine,

a fascinating guy up out of Creston named Drew Gallius, who's converted an old Massey tractor to an electric tractor. So taking the diesel engine out and installed electric. This guy's developed a really, really functional tractor. I mean, he's got solar panels on the top of the tractor, and they charge a whacking great bank of lead acid batteries that are where the engine used to be. And according to Drew, you know, he can head hay for three hours straight on a sunny morning, rake hay. He can plow with it. He can do everything with it. Now, how much he can do depends on the energy output of the tractor. So, of course, plowing or something is very energy intensive.

But this is not a goofy, fun thing. It's really a working tractor. And he says it's utterly marvelous. I mean, there's no fuel being consumed, but there's no fumes. So when he uses it inside the barn, there's no issues as we would have with an internal combustion engine in a confined space. And he's got himself a rechargeable electric-powered tractor. And I thought, you know, if this is right, and I think it is, this could be replicated successfully in small farms across the country. So that's really stimulating for me.

So maybe the issue is slightly less practical, slightly more researchy than we see in most issues of Small Farm Canada. So, Tom, where can people pick up the issue? Okay, in Canada, available on quite a few regular magazine newsstands. I think almost every chapter store has us. A select feed and farm supply stores, and of course in Canada or the U.S., available through subscription. You can subscribe through our website,

or we have a toll-free line too. That's best found on the website as well. Okay, so folks can subscribe by visiting smallfarmcanada.ca. And I suspect the best deal to be had is to become a print subscriber. That's the best per price deal going. Absolutely. You know, if you think you're going to enjoy this magazine issue after issue, you're far better off subscribing than you are just picking them off the newsstands. Tom, thanks so much. Jordan, nice chatting. Take care.

Folks, if you're a fan of the Ruminant Podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you could give me some help promoting it. One fairly easy and really helpful thing you could do is to head over to the ruminant.ca and find the specific page for your favorite recent episode of the ruminant podcast. From there, either grab the link from the address bar or look at the bottom of the page for a little link called share. Click on that and it will allow you to share the episode on your favorite social media platform. I'd love to be doing more promotion myself, but it seems like by the time I get each episode out each week, it's right around the time that my wife Vanessa starts screaming at me to stop working on the dang podcast so I can go out and earn some money to pay for her Big League Chew addiction. Actually,

come to think of it, another way you could help the podcast if you don't feel like sharing episodes is to send a package of Big League Chew to 4855 McKinnon Road, Peachland, BC, V0H1X2. Vanessa prefers wild pitch watermelon flavor, but anything will do in a pinch. Thanks in advance. Okay, so last week featured part one of my conversation with Craig LaHoullier, who is a tomato expert and author of the book Epic Tomatoes. And in part one, we focused mainly on some production considerations regarding growing great tomatoes. In this last segment with Craig, we talk about how tomato colors are classified, which is a topic I didn't know anything about. It's pretty interesting. And then we get into some of Craig's recommendations

for great heirloom tomato varieties to grow. Craig believes it's really important to get the specific varieties that tend to perform and taste the best, rather than just saying, well, I like a dark tomato, like a brown tomato, so I'm going to get, you know, a black creme or a black prince or a black Russian or whatever. Well, I'll let Craig talk about it. Here you go, and I'll talk to black Russian or whatever. Well, I'll let Craig talk about it. Here you go. And I'll talk to you at the end. Okay, Craig.

Well, for time considerations, if nothing else, I think we'll move on. I thought we could end with a discussion about varieties. And so one thing I'll mention about the book is that you, in the book you feature your 10 best varieties, heirloom varieties with the exception of one or two hybrids that you recommend growing as your favorites. And what I did is I emailed you before this conversation and asked you to adapt it for commercial growers. So if a commercial grower is inclined to grow really flavorful tomatoes

but also needs to be thinking about yield and disease resistance and whatnot, I asked you to adapt the list and you very generously obliged me. But before we do that, I thought maybe you could start by talking about the official color classifications for tomatoes because it surprised me. If we're going to talk technically about tomato colors, I think people easily get confused about what actually counts as a pink tomato versus a red tomato versus a yellow versus an orange versus a purple versus a black. So could you briefly talk about how we classify tomato color? Yeah, and let me start by saying the confusion in tomato colors has been eternal. And if you look in old seed catalogs, they will often talk about a purple tomato, and they mean pink. And today, when we say red tomato, all you need to do is look at

the Seed Savers Exchange catalog and realize that people are putting pink tomatoes in the red section and red tomatoes in the pink section. So the thing about tomato colors is the color of a tomato that we perceive is the unique combination of the color of the flesh when it's overlaid by the color of the skin. And tomatoes have two main skin colors, yellow and clear. And what this means is you could have lots of different colored tomatoes, but once you slice them and put them on a plate, if you weren't looking at the skin, it would look like you had far less colors. And so those who are growing, those who are chefs, those who are cooking with

tomatoes, I always encourage for the most visual interest, make sure you use preparations where you can see some of the skin because that really bumps up the diversity of tomato colors. So if you've got a red flesh, which is actually more like a pinky red and a yellow skin, it's what we classify as the traditional red tomato. I like the word scarlet better because it has a tinge of yellow or orange to it. But anyone who has looked at a sweet million or a celebrity or a big boy or a better boy or aroma, that's your red tomato. If instead of yellow, the skin is clear, then it's a pink tomato. And Brandywine, German Johnson,

Ypres Purple Ball, those are examples, pretty well-known pink tomatoes. Ferris wheel that I talked about earlier on. Now, if the flesh retains some chlorophyll when it ripens, which is an unusual genetic trait, and when I talked early on about Cherokee purple, that was the first tomato I've seen of this type. If that tomato with the high chlorophyll content, along with the red lycopenes, has a clear skin, it looks almost purple. And if it has a yellow skin, it looks almost brown. And those yellows and browns comprise what lots of seed catalogs

now call the black tomatoes. Black because they have a darker pigment in the center. And then it gets a little easier from there. Most of the confusion is between purple-brown and red-pink. Clearly, orange tomatoes are kind of an orange juice color. They're a pale orange if the skin is clear. They're a deep orange if the skin is yellow. Yellows can range from an interior of almost a canary color to a deeper yellow. And it's all controlled by sets of color genes that have different elements of being recessive or dominant. Tomatoes that are kind of an ivory color with a clear skin,

almost paper colored, they can appear as white. And then you get into some really interesting ones with stripes in the skin or swirls of different colors in the flesh. And perhaps this is a really interesting one, but there is a set of tomatoes that don't change color when they ripen. The flesh stays brass green. The skin can be either clear or yellow, and they are amongst the most delicious tomatoes I've ever eaten. And what's really interesting is to watch people who have fairly conservative food tastes who, you know, I only like to eat red tomatoes. If you can get them to eat some of these tomatoes of different colors, they start asking for seedlings of the green tomato the next year. So it is possible to change people's tastes.

And I think this would be particularly interesting to market gardeners to have kind of a starter kit of how do you start, you know, people like what they like, but they only like what they know. How do you start convincing people to try other things so they can like different things as well? And it makes their food all that much more interesting. So it wasn't so short, but I think we colored the color palette of tomatoes the way that I use it anyway. Okay, perfect. Well, on that note, let's, I have the list in front of me, Craig, do you? Sure. Okay, great. So let's just, let's go down the list. So first, what are your recommendations for commercial market gardeners to grow with regards to red

tomatoes? Well, you know, one of the interesting things is red, red is the tomato that I think most of us grew up with and think of when we think of a tomato, because that was the vast predominance of tomato varieties from the 1840s right through the Seed Savers catalog and the advent of the popularity of heirlooms in the 1970s and 80s. Most tomatoes were red. Great red tomatoes to me are amongst the hardest to choose just because it seems like some of the real flavor superstars have different colors. Now, I'm going to preface it here in saying that after tasting over 2,000 tomato varieties,

I've not found a super strong correlation between color and flavor. Flavor is controlled by a different set of genes than color. However, there is a generality that I've found many of the white tomatoes to be on the bland side and many of the green tomatoes to be absolutely delicious, but there are exceptions. So we'll get that out of the way quick. With red tomatoes, So we'll get that out of the way quick. With red tomatoes, I think if you want something that looks really nice and you're trying to get people over maybe the ugly heirloom, so you want maybe a smoother tomato and more of a medium-sized tomato, a variety that seems to date from the 1880s in Pennsylvania called red brandy lime,

as long as you're focusing on what's called the Landis Valley strain or the regular leaf strain, Brandy Line is so confused as a tomato name right now. We could do a whole other podcast just on that. Nepal, which Johnny selected seeds first offered in the mid-80s, was the tomato that actually turned me from a hybrid grower to an heirloom lover. It is that delicious. And it's just an ordinary six to eight ounce round red, but it's just superb. And Drew's from Bulgaria, D-R-U-Z-B-A, are all really good six to eight ounce, productive tomatoes that stand up to disease really well.

And if people are looking for that big red beefsteak flavor you can't go wrong for Acres West Virginia or Andrews Ray Hart Jumbo Red but with over 10,000 named tomato varieties what you're getting is one person's view based on my experience and you could get 50 other tomato enthusiasts and probably get some different lists, but there's a good start. Okay, so how about let's move on to pink. Well, you know, if people grow Brandywine a year where it's happy in your yard, and this is a potato leaf. Potato leaf is a shape of leaf shape that's unusual in that it doesn't have the cuts and the serrations. Also historic variety, big pink fruit. That may be the most delicious tomato I've ever tasted. However, it's not easy to grow and it does differently every year. So along the same lines

as the flavor, there's one called Stump of the World and there's another called Dester. And they're just absolutely delicious. And when people taste tomatoes like this, they often just kind of swoon. You know, it's that old-fashioned, super delicious tomato that they've been looking for their whole life. Either Purple Ball, which is more of a round, medium-sized tomato, is a beauty. And, you know, people who think that heirlooms are ugly should take a look at how that grows. And all of these, again, the parameters that we're looking

here are fruit that are pretty good looking and plants that are pretty tolerant of diseases in general and will yield well over a wide area. Okay, terrific. I just want to note, I've grown brandy wine before and it's a wonderful tomato, but I've also found that it's a little inconsistent, so I'm glad to get those other recommendations. Okay, moving on to purple. I think it must go without saying that I think I know which one you're going to suggest.

Yeah, and I'll give you some alternates as well. I mean, Cherokee purple is a great tomato. Carbon is a really great purple tomato. And one called Indian stripe, which actually seems to hail from the same region of the country as Cherokee purple, and may in fact share either some of the same genes or be very, very close to. The purple tomatoes just tend to be pretty delicious. And while we're at it, we'll cover the brown-colored tomatoes. And Cherokee chocolate is a variety that arose in my garden one year as a skin color mutation of Cherokee purple.

So it has all of the attributes, interior color, flavor, yield, and disease tolerance of Cherokee purple, but in that nice brick red, mahogany, chocolatey color. And again, if you wanted to put those two tomatoes side by side in a plate, you want to let some skin show, because once you slice them, they're going to look pretty much identical inside. Okay. All right. What about yellow, Craig? Well, so I'll give you my favorite large yellow, and I didn't email this to you because it's not the easiest to find and the easiest to grow, but anyone who gets to taste a variety called Lillian's Yellow Heirloom would be blown away by it. But it's quite late, so it's probably not adapted to cooler regions of the country, and it's not the highest

yielder. But it is probably the ultimate in yellow flesh tomatoes. As a compromise, I suggested to you a variety called Hughes, A-Q-G-H-S, with an apostrophe. And that originated with a fellow named Archie Hook, who used to grow the plants in his neighborhood, Indiana, in the 1940s. A lot of my customers also really love a cherry tomato that's bright yellow called Galena, that's from Russia, and a hybrid, we'll maybe cross the line here and talk about a few hybrids as well, called Lemon Boy, that many of my customers wouldn't do without. Bright yellow, medium-sized, absolutely delicious. So those are all really good choices. And very close to yellow in color is orange, but that nice orange juice color is very, very attractive. And Dr. Witch's yellow,

it's very similar to Kellogg's Breakfast, which is the orange. But I think Dr. Witch, being a little bit smaller, seems to be a little bit higher yielding, less temperamental, has a little more flavor for me. And really no garden should be without Sun Gold, which is an orange cherry tomato. It's a hybrid. It's most people's desert island pick. They wouldn't be without it. You know, we call it tomato crack. It's that addictive and that delicious.

Excellent. Well, I know people will be interested in green when ripe, green when ripe tomatoes. A little less common. And you mentioned earlier they're some of the tastiest. Yeah, so the last colors, and these are the more obscure ones, there's a variety, well, so I talked about when Cherokee purple had a skin color mutation and Cherokee chocolate was born in my garden, and then a few years later, Cherokee chocolate had a flesh color mutation and Cherokee green was born. So again, that same intense, delicious, well-balanced flavor of the Cherokees, only in a tomato that

stays green when ripe. I discovered that in 97 and sent it to a few seed companies, and that's becoming pretty popular. One called Green Giant that a seed collecting friend in Germany sent me. People love that tomato. The only conundrum is it has a clear skin when it ripens. And you almost have to grow it and practice with it a little bit because the color change from unripe to ripe is barely noticeable. But what you learn to find is that the blossom end gets a pale, pearly pink blush to it.

And it is a tomato that has won many tasting competitions. It is that good. So those are the greens. I'm less enthusiastic about the big yellow ones with the red streaks. There is at least 80 or 100 different name varieties in the Seed Savers Exchange yearbook. They're gorgeous. They may be the most beautiful of all tomatoes, but we talked about how different people perceive color differently.

People also perceive flavor differently, and their palates have different preferences. I find that the yellow tomatoes with red swirls are so sweet that they almost come across as bland to me. The only one that I absolutely love, well, there's two. One that I actually bred myself due to the intervention of bumblebees or bees of some sort in my garden to help create an unexpected hybrid. I worked with a friend to create a variety called Lucky Cross that has Brandywine lineage. So if you think that big yellow-red tomato in color, but think Brandywine in flavor, that tells

you what Lucky Cross is like. And we also then released a sister tomato to it that's around four to five ounces, but they're absolutely delicious. In the white category, the only one that I can fully get behind is one of the dwarfs that we bred called Mr. Snow that is just outrageously delicious. And it's a tomato that has a lot of tartness to it. And some people really like a tomato with a tart bite. As far as the really pretty striped tomatoes that are starting to emerge now

over the last few years, I haven't found any that I've loved yet, mostly because they really struggle growing in my Raleigh garden. But the one I'd probably recommend the most would be Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, which is essentially the color of Cherokee purple in the size. It has these gorgeous jagged vertical green and gold stripes. And that pretty much is a good starter kit for maybe a tomato or two of every color class just to start from and then take the adventure from there. Oh, that's so great, Craig. Thank you. So I have one more question then, or I a cup maybe a couple of questions but essentially I think I'm not the only one who has been occasionally cavalier in obtaining my varieties

in the sense that well oh I've had great luck with black crim but this seed company that I'm already ordering from doesn't have crim but they have black prince, six and one half dozen in the other. And I'll grab this other one. And I'm just, it just really seems like you've been so specific in what you've suggested that you, it's probably not a great approach. It's probably important to put the effort into sourcing the varieties that you've recommended or whatever. Just because two tomatoes look the same,

it sounds like they can be vastly different in terms of their performance and taste. You've raised a really good point that I don't think has been thought about or discussed as much. If you think back for our horticultural history, we had seed companies that offered varieties, and tomatoes are pretty limited in numbers of varieties. And universities did testing back then and published papers saying that there probably wasn't 100 varieties. There was probably 20, but seed companies were involved in competition and trying to make profit, so there was some renaming going on or, you know, so one catalog's success would be another company's Paragon.

So that has always been there through the years because selling seeds and selling varieties is a very competitive business. Now we've got this thing called the Internet. We've also had times where the economy has gotten tough and so and then we had the seed savers exchange and all of the heirlooms that have flooded so what we are here we're at a time where there has never ever been a greater choice of varieties to grow. There has never been a wider choice of sources to get your seeds from, but there is probably the number of actual experts at the level of, say, me or somebody like Carolyn Mayo or Bill Minky, other Seed Saver members

who have really made it almost a passion to study and maintain the history varieties, that's not always where people or have lost their original identity. And so it's a very chancy time to be – I mean, it's a great time to be buying seed, but there are some cautions that go along with it because clearly not every variety that is listed by every source, not every source is selling the variety as it should be. And sometimes, rarely if ever are they doing it knowingly. It's just that institutional knowledge gets lost along the way. So I'll have a tomato and I'll send it to somebody and they'll send it to be replicated somewhere along the way it got crossed

that the people growing that seed don't know what it's supposed to look like. And then it winds up in a seed catalog and it's not at all what that person sent me. And this is happening more and more and more. I try to do what I can to look at seed catalogs and see if some of the varieties that I'm aware of have come through unchanged or not, but varieties are very specific for their color, for their flavor. Black crim and black prince, for example, have no relationship to each other whatsoever.

Black crim is a one pound beefsteak type that has very little sweetness. Black prince is maybe a threepound beefsteak type that has very little sweetness. Black prince is maybe a three- to four-inch round type. Black cream is a purple. Black prince is considered a brown. But it takes maybe a nut at the level of the obsession level that I've become to kind of learn this stuff. So I guess educate yourself, use lots of sources, ask questions. I'm always happy to be a resource for questions if somebody's curious about a variety or is looking for a good source. I try to blog about this stuff, but we're in an exciting time. We're in the middle of the embedding of a lot of these heirlooms

to where they're starting to show up in grocery stores and farmer's markets and on more people's tables. So maybe a little bit of the messiness that we're experiencing right now is inevitable, and it's just how we treat it going forward. How do we get histories as accurate as possible and seed sources as accurate as possible? How do we manage the collision between commerce and accuracy? Because that can often be messy, you know, between people needing and wanting to make money off something, working with people who are, the most important thing is the truth and the history and the story

of the variety and the accuracy. And we're just kind of figuring this all out as we go along right now. Right. So it definitely sounds like, uh, it's, it's kind of buyer beware. And, and like you say, do your homework and, and source your seed from reputable sources, many of which are listed at the back of your book. Yep. Absolutely. Well, there's, there's a lot more i could ask you craig lajolier but uh i i think i think this is a good a good first go so um craig lajolier author of epic tomatoes

how to select and grow the best variety varieties of all time thank you so much this has just been uh just so so helpful and interesting, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Well, it's made my day, and it's been a pleasure here as well. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Dear ruminant listener, that's the end of the podcast. I hope you liked it. I'll talk to you next week. XOXO. Sincerely, Jordan Marr. P.S. Miss you already. Life like it was meant to be, aw don't fret honey I've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars

And maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water, and peaches. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve i don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and braces we'll keep close

quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be Do do do do do do Do do do do do do