Tomato tasting returns

Much loved festival returns to Morrison Point Road

Awalk with Vicki Emlaw through her field of tomatoes is punctuated with full stops and exclamations. Every few paces, she will stop to pick one or two choice fruit and give a mini biography of the plant with a passion that never wavers, and is seemingly ever increasing. She pauses at a variety known as Café Brulée, and picks a ripe brownish red tomato “I am so in love with this!” she says, adding there’s also a surprising green variety from which she will definitely be saving seeds. Another few steps and another stop. “This is Ozark Sunrise, it’s a beautiful pink inside. Such beautiful, beautiful creatures!” She says that choosing a favourite tomato is akin to picking a favourite child, but she does admit to having a few favourites. One of them is Sweet Aperitif, a variety she obtained from a seed supplier in Idaho. “I remember thinking that I’m not going to grow any really red tomatoes, because everybody else grows them, but this one is surprisingly red. It is so good, and I’m so surprised. It’s doing great and it has so many tomatoes on each plant.” She has well over 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes growing in the field or under the friendly shelter of a cold frame, and she knows the details on every one of them— what they taste like, how the ripen, where she got the seeds from.

This is her first season back after an absence from farming for several years. Previously, she and a team of about a dozen workers would have had over 8,000 tomato plants growing in the fields. Starting again on her own has been a challenge, and she estimates she has fewer than 2,000 plants this year.

Vicki Emlaw holds an assortment of tomatoes harvested from her field.

“After taking a break for a little while, it’s nice to be back and walking in the beautiful soil on Morrison Point Road in my bare feet,” she says. “I’m working on my own for the first time in 18 years, and it’s been particularly challenging. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do and how I want to do it, and how to figure out all the problems on my own.” She is grateful for all the support she has received from her friends and members of the community. In the spring she had people dropping by unannounced to help her set up the cold frame, or to do some tilling, or to help with getting her seedlings planted in the field. “I’m so grateful to be in a community that really helps out and will do whatever they can,” she says.

This year’s growing season has been a bit of a challenge for Emlaw. A cold spring meant that planting in the field was delayed, and those tomatoes are only now reaching maturity. Some of the plants under the cold frame have been attacked by tomato hornworm, which can severely reduce the productivity of the plant. Out in the field, Emlaw has been plagued by a murder of crows, and while she wishes she could respond in keeping with the collective noun, she turned instead to the County’s scarecrows. “The crows were eating every single ripe tomato, sometimes taking a single peck, sometimes eating the whole thing,” she says. “I got in a good supply of scarecrows, thanks to the Scarecrow Festival, but they just kept the crows company, that’s all they did.” Eventually , Emlaw hit upon the use of strands of fishing line and pieces of reflective tape to dissuade the crows from raiding her harvest.

Emlaw started her tomato tasting event in 2000, after discovering that although she grew several varieties of tomatoes, visitors to her farm stand would buy only the standard looking round red ones. “Because the tomatoes looked so different, people didn’t know what they were or what they tasted like,” she says. “So I decided to have a tomato tasting. I had so many tomatoes and I needed people to try them so that they would buy them. People love the tomatoes now, and this year my problem is having enough tomatoes to supply everyone.” The tomato tasting event takes place on Saturday, August 31, and Emlaw has put out a request for donations from anyone who has grown tomatoes from her seedlings. In exchange, she will offer a free seedling next spring. For Emlaw, the tasting festival is all about education and spreading the idea that people can grow their own food, and in particular grow those things that they actually like the taste of. This year visitors can sample from about 150 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, in a rainbow of colours, a variety of textures, and a wide gamut of flavour from tart to sweet. The tasting event is part of the Black River Fall Festival, and takes place on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.