Skip to content
Food
Link copied to clipboard

Philly's growing tomato scene

Locally cultivated fruit that eats like a veggie is back and delicious—but not for long.

Tomato grower Tim Mountz took these photos of his summer haul at his Happy Cat Farm in Kennett Square.
Tomato grower Tim Mountz took these photos of his summer haul at his Happy Cat Farm in Kennett Square.Read more

TIM MOUNTZ remembers the first time he ate a tomato - that is, the first time he Ate A Tomato.

Back in his college days, well before becoming a pomodoro whisperer, the founder of Kennett Square's Happy Cat Farm was working the plants at Eckerton Hill Farm, in Lenhartsville, Berks County. At the height of the summer tomato harvest, he reached for a plump specimen swelling off the vine, plucked it, and decided to treat it like a certain other reddish spherical fruit.

"I bit into it as an apple," he said. "And it was like being backstage with Jefferson Airplane. It was transformative."

Hearing people rhapsodize about savory-sweet globules, even in such lofty, possibly psychedelic tones, is common this time of year. That's because it's tomato season in Pennsylvania, and right on cue, far-flung farmers, big-city growers, ambitious at-home gardeners and straight-up nightshade freaks are salivating at the prospects.

Seeds in secret

Mountz founded Happy Cat in 2008, carrying on his family's agriculture tradition to honor his late grandfather. The operation started small, but it's leveled up every year. As of this season, he's got something like 5,000 plants in the ground, 400 tomato varieties spread out over six Brandywine Valley acres. Happy Cat sells seeds year-round, but it's finally harvest time.

Last Friday, Mountz and his team hauled in 2,100 pounds of tomatoes. "I think this coming week and the following week will be even bigger," he said.

Happy Cat's boxes of mixed tomatoes, which he sells at the Rittenhouse and Headhouse Square farmers markets on weekends, burst with a Zoobilee Zoo-vibrant menagerie of shapes, sizes, colors and patterns. This is thanks to his interest in hunting down unusual, sometimes rare seeds, which he purchases from catalogs, trades with other growers and even acquires via a "weird secret seed-saving society" that you can breach only if brought in by a member.

(Like Fight Club, for people who really like Caprese salads.)

The passion that Mountz has for tomatocraft is on par with the difficulty of successfully growing his favorite fruit. Vine tenders at any level will tell you just how temperamental tomato cultivation can be. "It's like sailing a ship," said Mountz. "You have to always be at the controls, checking."

Touchy tomatoes

Ian Brendle, whose Gap-based Green Meadow Farm provides Lancaster fresh tomatoes and dozens of other products to dozens of Philadelphia restaurants, knows what it takes better than most. This season's weather patterns, featuring gluts of heavy rain and a preponderance of overcast days, offered some challenges: Too much moisture is bad for tomatoes, as is too little sun.

"Tomatoes are very susceptible to soil-borne diseases," said Brendle, whose father, Glenn, came up with the idea to line their 300-foot tomato rows with unbleached brown paper, to block weeds and prevent rain from splashing excess soil onto the plants.

On Green Meadow's acreage, the Brendles grow mostly Italian tomatoes, good for sauce-making and drying, like San Marzanos and Stupices. Just 10 minutes away, an Amish grower with whom they work closely focuses more heavily on specialty heirloom varieties, those obscure, unpredictable and visually stunning specimens with names as colorful as their skins: Indigo Blue, Green Vernissage, Striped German, Mortgage Lifter, Black From Tula-tomatoes, or tracks off an as-yet-unreleased Prince album?

City croppers

Heirloom plants - generally understood to mean anything sprouted from seeds preserved by growers outside factory-farm macro-agriculture - have been coveted by both farmers and eaters in recent years. "Chefs have always been interested in heirloom varieties . . . generally, heirlooms translate to flavor," said Brendle.

At a stunning rooftop garden of an Alterra Properties' Wharton Street Lofts, at 12th and Wharton, in South Philly, chef Shola Olunloyo grows about 15 different types of heirlooms, started from scratch via California's rare-seed purveyor Baker Creek, or from plants provided by Savoie Organics, in Williamstown, New Jersey. The Black Krims, Green Zebras and Persimmon tomatoes, as well as the dozens of other herbs and vegetable varieties that Olunloyo tends to on his green roof, work their way into various cooking projects, and sometimes into the hands of chef friends Stephanie Reitano and Marc Vetri.

On the opposite side of the city, Lily Fischer and Nima Etemadi, partners in Frankford Avenue's upcoming Cake Life Bake Shop, take polar opposite approaches to home tomato growing. Etemadi, in his second-floor apartment, has set up window tomato boxes buttressed by shower curtain tension rods, which the vines of his now 10-foot-tall cherry-tomato plants squeeze in an intimate embrace. Fischer, who owns a house with her husband a few blocks away, has a back door that leads out into a large community garden, where she and 30 to 40 of her equally green-thumbed neighbors apply daily TLC to a wild, thriving patch of tangled, fruit-bearing vines.

Kenso-grown

The Cake Life team's nearby Kensington neighbor, Greensgrow Farms, is also poised for a sizeable tomato harvest this year. Lead farmer Katelyn Repash has about 150 or so plants going, beefsteaks and Pink Beauties and Valencias she started as teeny-tiny seedlings in a greenhouse this past winter. They're now taller than she is (she's about 5-4).

The plants started fruiting about three weeks back, and this week's public farmstands, which run Thursdays and Saturdays at Greensgrow, should feature a very hefty haul. "This month, and next month and a little bit into September, it's the only time you get the tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes," said Repash.

That sheer timing, or maybe the sheer lack of it, might be what makes tomato season so enthralling for so many people. No matter what's growing where and who's growing it, the window of time to enjoy this delicate, temperamental fruit exactly how it's meant to be enjoyed is nearly cruel in its brevity.

People like Mountz try very hard not to squander it. His perfect day, he said, is the one that ends thusly: "I lay my head down on the pillow, and I realize that for breakfast, lunch and dinner, all I ate that day was tomatoes."