Heirloom Tomatoes

Heirloom Tomatoes Bill Best Around the middle of September this year, I went to North Carolina to visit with a first cousin I hadn't seen in forty-four years who was coming in from Idaho where he has lived since his retirement from the air force. We met at a convenient place for both of us—the farmers' market in Asheville. Despite our long time apart, we instantly recognized each other and set about reliving times past on the Liner Creek part of the Upper Crabtree community in Haywood County, North Carolina, in the forties and fifties. First we discussed our Grandmother Sanford, who, we agreed, was a cook and gardener beyond compare. She was also an early riser, getting up early to go out to awaken the roosters so that they might crow to awaken everyone else. Standing amidst the colorful and aromatic displays of fruits, vegetables, and canned and dried foods, we then talked about the A faculty member at Berea College, Bill Best teaches physical education, creative writing, and mythology. 19 gardening we had grown up with and how it had influenced our eating and work habits. Then, when it came time for him and his wife to leave to go visit other relatives, he informed me that they were moving back to North Carolina from Idaho and that his goal, at age seventy-one, was to become a vendor at the farmers' market to continue his life-long love of working with vegetables. Our talk broughtback to me the dependence we had on one another growing up and the necessity of having good gardens to put food on the table. For us, as families whose only livelihood was subsistence farming supplemented by a little hunting, trapping, and ginseng digging, gardening was not merely a hobby. Good gardens ensured eating well until the next ones started yielding the following year. Our conversation also brought back to me some of my personal experiences as a child and the role vegetables played for me. Mother always took me, as the oldest child, with her to work the gardens and to pick wild nuts and berries which we also depended on. I became expert at picking cherries and climbed with her all over the mountains to pick the finest wild blackberries. However, my personal favorite work with fruits and vegetables was with tomatoes. I took special care with them. In addition to having tomatoes at least two meals daily during the summer, when school started in the fall, I took tomato sandwiches to school until those I had stored away finally gave out and I then started eating the lunches prepared by the cooks at school. But I was so fond of tomato sandwiches (with mayonnaise) that I took them for my lunch even if no light bread was available and I had to take them on biscuits instead. In fact, after the last tomatoes were gone, for about two weeks I took mayonnaise sandwiches instead and imagined myself eating tomato sandwiches. My most memorable year as a child was when we didn't have a killing frost until after Thanksgiving and I dug ripe tomatoes from a freshly fallen snow for Thanksgiving dinner. Such was, and continues to be, my love of tomatoes. I have gardened almost all of my life since Grandpa Best began teaching me the differences between young sweet potato and cocklebur plants when I was two years old. Beans and tomatoes have always been my favorite vegetables, but having paid tribute to beans in this magazine (Winter 1998) I turn now to tomatoes. From my earliest memory we grew both heirloom and commercial (seed catalogue) tomatoes. Of course, we didn't call them heirlooms. They were just tomatoes of different colors and stripes and I never gave the varieties a second thought. I liked all of them and thought I was eating the best food available. (Science may be now proving me 20 right, since tomatoes have been shown not to have many negatives and to have many positives with respect to health.) When I started my own serious gardens in the early sixties, I simply went with the seeds and plants available for...