Aunt Jubilee’s Great Orange Ball of Flaming Fire

The cold snap last week saw the whole neighborhood shrouded in old blankets and flannel sheets as people attempted to protect their greenery from the insidious killing frost. I’ve never seen that before. It looked morbid and tender at the same time.

Not much gardening could be done so I dragged my babies indoors, positioned them under a grow light, and settled in to do some serious botanical research.

I’ve been wanted to learn more about the different tomatoes I might grow, and so I sat down at the computer, typed a few words into the search engine, and thus I began my odyssey into the fantastic, fanatical, endlessly fascinating world of Heirloom tomatoes.

And what a world! Did you know there are over 4,000 varieties of tomato? In the supermarket you’re lucky to find maybe 4 or 5 varieties, and even then they are just this mealy, tasteless, anonymous produce. A mockery of cultivation! A tomato satire!

Spend a few minutes on the internet, however and you’re exposed to a veritable cornucopia of tomatomania. They come in all imaginable shapes, sizes, colors. Red? How passé! Try peach, or black, or eggshell white. Some of them even have stripes.



Some are lumpy and enormous, weighing 3 pounds or more. Some are tiny and sweet, like little candies. Almost all have these fabulous names, like Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Mr Stripey, Nebraska Wedding, Wapsipinicon Peach and my favorite: Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter.

Their descriptions are rapturous. The Ananas Noire Tomato is, apparently:

“a true gem as it features a genuine kaleidoscope of colors between a jade green, a stunning purple and a bright yellow. When sliced, it reveals a bright green flesh with deep crimson streaks of color that has a wonderful sweet, smoky flavor with a slight hint of citrus.”

Might as well by a wine label. And why not? This, I’ve learned is a serious art. Most of these cultivars have been painstakingly perfected over years and years by passionate backyard botanists, then carefully passed on through the generations. It's no hobby.

I spent hours pouring over my choices. A whole world of flavor and texture and novelty has been opened to me. At the moment I’ve narrowed it down to about 97 varieties that I need for my garden . When I come to my senses I suppose I can narrow that down to about ten or so. Stay tuned!