Heirloom: Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer

By Tim Stark published by Broadway Books, NY, 2008

Heirloom: Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer is the bestselling book at the Uptown Espresso in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Last week farmer/author Tim Stark delivered a case of books to the cafe along with a load of tomatoes and red beets. I picked up a copy of curiosity. I am not much of a gardener, no gourmet, never pause on the food channel, but found this book to be quite extraordinary. I hoped Heirloom might be a ‘great book for a farmer.’ Well, it turns out, Heirloom is a great book for any writer of English language prose.

Tim Stark calls himself one of the tomato people. New York food critics anoint him with loftier titles: Chief of the Tomato People, Tomato Guru, Rockstar Tomato Farmer. He doesn’t grow the flavorless red variety. He grows Cherokee Purples, Green Zebras, and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifters. His heirloom tomatoes are the cover-girls of Gourmet magazine and find their way into the kitchens of the world’s great chefs.

The publisher’s press release succinctly outlines his success:
‘Fourteen years ago, living in Brooklyn, working days as a management consultant, …writing unpublished short stories by night. One evening, chancing upon a dumpster full of discarded lumber, he built a germination rack for thousands of heirloom tomato seedlings. His crop soon outgrew the brownstone, forcing him to cart the seedlings to his family’s farm in Pennsylvania, where they were transplanted into the ground by hand. When favorable weather brought in a bumper crop, Tim hauled his unusual tomatoes to New York City’s Union Greenmarket, at a time when the tomato was unanimously red. The rest is history.’

Stark writes his story with wit, economy, and a distinct voice. I’m a big fan of John McPhee’s nonfiction. Heirloom makes reference to McPhee’s Giving Good Weight, which chronicled the early days of the Union Square Greenmarket where Stark sells his prize tomatoes. But Heirloom reminds me more of McPhee’s 1966 classic, Oranges. The back cover of Oranges quotes a review from Harper’s, “This is a surprising book. You may come to the end of it and say to yourself, ‘But I can’t have read a whole book about oranges!’ But the chances are you will have done so… It’s a delicious book… more absorbing than many a novel.” Substitute “tomatoes” for “oranges” and those same words could be printed on Heirloom’s cover.

While Heirloom is mostly about tomatoes, there is a full chapter about the “misunderstood” habanero pepper and a killer chapter about a groundhog in the greenhouse. Most wonderful are the elegant descriptions of the land and soil, and tender portraits of the people who grow the food we eat.
Take Milt Miller, for example. At first glance the description of the old farmer borders on a broad-brush caricature of the Pennsylvania Dutch. When asked what he likes to do for fun, Milt says ‘plow.’ We learn Milt’s wife’s maiden name was Jennie Zettlemoyer, pronounced locally, “Chennie Thettle-moyah.” It becomes clear, though, Stark holds the plowman in the high regard, “The damp sensual pleasure of bringing earth to light. The wormy aroma of satiny upturned clods drying in the April sun. That was what turned Milt on.”

At one point Stark wanted this book to be titled ‘A Farm Grows in Brooklyn.” His editor preferred Heirloom and, considering the meaning of heirloom in the broadest sense, the editor’s suggestion seems apt. Stark examines not only the tomato’s DNA, but also the unique heritage of eastern Pennsylvania farmers, and his own remarkable genetic inheritance. He dedicates the book to his parents. Sharon Sheehe Stark is an accomplished writer. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and earned an O’Henry Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His father is a retired courthouse lawyer turned kayaker with flair for the dramatic: “Reading had furnished my father with a vocabulary that rarely defaulted to the word ‘thing.”

Reading Heirloom, there were a few small patches I found rough plowing. I must admit literary allusions to Agamemnon to Cheever were largely lost on me, and lovely words like ‘sedulous’ and ‘bosky’ lie outside my vocabulary. I hope to remedy these shortcomings of my own education even as I expand my palate to include a firsthand knowledge of the Yellow Brandywine and Green Zebra. I had my first Cherokee Purple this week; it was sublime. Clearly, this book has affected me more than most.

One chapter, Among the Mennonites, is a dazzling example of artistic excellence in essay form. Stark begins like a gifted small-town sportswriter covering an impromptu game of ‘cornerball,’ he then veers off into a lucid history of the Mennonites with a fascinating digression on pneumatic tractor tires, before arcing back to the ball game to launch into touching depiction of his friend and fellow farmer, James Weaver.

” Without James Weaver, I would have never survived my first years as a farmer. How many times did I show up at James’s Meadow View Farm with a flurry of questions just as he was mounting his tractor to go out and work? Is the ground fit to plow? What are these spots on the leaves of my tomato plants? How come my Scotch bonnets aren’t setting fruit? Sometimes I would even walk right out into the middle of the field with my latest emergency, and he would stop the tractor, and turn off the engine, and, if necessary, pull out a piece of paper and a pencil so he could draw a little diagram for me.”

We might be blessed to live on good earth, but most of us are long estranged from our agricultural past.
Too few of us venture into the vegetable aisles, let alone a working farm. Lucky for us, some farmers are willing to share.

Coming Next Issue:

After reviewing Heirloom Kevin McCloskey was so impressed with Tim Stark’s story that he contacted him to ask for a ten minute interview.
Instead, he got a ten hour interview that included a truck ride from Berks County, PA to the Hunt’s Point Market in the Bronx. Read all about it in our September issue.

More information about Heirloom, including an excerpt of Chapter 1, is available on Random House’s website.

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