You Say Tomato… Last year Hilda and her husband Bruce Tipton raised more than 40 varieties of summer’s favorite fruit, including Chocolate Stripes, Purple Russians and exotic Japanese Trifele Blacks.by Mackensy Lunsford       

photos by Naomi Johnson

Tomatoes grow well in a mild climate like Western North Carolina’s, and there are several large commercial tomato operations here. But with heirloom tomatoes, amateur growers and professionals alike are using the long growing season to let their imaginations—and their gardens—run wild. And really, compared to supermarket tomatoes, heirlooms rock.

The first garden tomato of the season can taste downright lusty after a winter of pallid fruit. Juicy and ripe, dripping with flavor, the tomato screams summer like very few foods. But there is a vast difference between the average mass-produced supermarket tomato, bred for durability rather than flavor, and the lovingly tended heirloom varieties some WNC farmers are coaxing from the soil: Cherokee Purples, German Johnsons, Arkansas Travelers, Thai Pinks, Jersey Devils and (Chip Hope’s personal favorite) Grandpa Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter.

Twelve years ago, Hope and his wife Julie Laramie started growing oddball heirloom tomato varieties on their Burnsville farm, Appalachian Seeds Farm and Nursery. In 12 years, he’s seen interest in heirlooms explode. In search of tomatoes with “old-timey flavor,” people have started growing their own, looking for seeds in specialty catalogs or at neighbors’ farms. “It’s really a story about families saving a variety of seeds and passing them down through families. It’s so much fun when you have a family who knows the story that goes along with the tomato,” Hope says.

In Hilda Rico Tipton’s case, the story that goes along with the tomato starts with the wrong package of seeds. Four years ago, Tipton requested a package of beefsteak tomato seeds at a local store to grow a tomato patch in the yard outside her Hendersonville home. She dutifully planted and nurtured the seeds, and then they began to grow…“and grow, and grow, and grow,” Tipton says, her eyes widening dramatically. Once the plants bore fruit, Hilda and her husband Bruce knew something had gone awry. What should have been large red beefsteak tomatoes were smaller and pink, or in some cases yellow, striped or black. The store, by happy accident, had given her the wrong seeds—mixed heirlooms instead of beefsteaks.

Tipton rolled with the punches and nurtured her patch of colorful tomatoes, preserving the seeds and seeking out more strange and rare varieties. She is now a member of Seed Savers International, a nonprofit dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Two years ago she started growing more tomatoes and selling them through her Tomato Art Company, so named because she was struck by the beauty of the wide color palette in her varieties. Last year the Tiptons raised more than 40 varieties of summer’s favorite fruit from the soils of their bucolic three-acre Rutherfordton farm, including Chocolate Stripes, Purple Russians and exotic Japanese Trifele Blacks. A Rutherford County program called Foothills Connect put Tipton in touch with chefs at upscale Charlotte restaurants and country clubs, and they’re now selling heirloom tomatoes to 15 regional Earth Fare stores and several Whole Foods stores in the Atlanta and Greenville, South Carolina, areas.

In addition to the stripey, darker fruits, Tipton has begun cultivating pink varieties that her male peers teased her about: they were just the types of tomatoes a woman would grow. But Hilda, in typical fashion, shrugged and proceeded to develop her very own variety of pink tomato, the “Hilda pink.” Working with Dr. Randy Gardner, an emeritus professor who lives in Mills River and spent his 30-year career at North Carolina State University in Raleigh breeding tomatoes, she bred the Hilda pink to be nearly neon. For the second year, she’s partnering with the National Breast Cancer Foundation to market the pinks, and now, most profits from sales of Hilda’s pink tomatoes go toward breast cancer research. The Tiptons expect to raise close to $5,000 for the charity this year. “When I saw how beautiful they were,” she says of her beloved pinks, “I thought it would be nice to help women since it’s a very feminine product—a very feminine tomato with good taste.”

Tipton, born and raised in Mexico, may have a head start on the rest of us tomato growers—agriculture is in her genes. When her paternal grandfather was killed in his fields, her grandmother found herself alone. So she dug in and learned to work the land with animals and a plow. Eventually, Hilda says proudly, she was one of the first women in her town to have a tractor and a well that she drilled herself. “A strong woman,” Hilda says. “She provided the education that all of her children wanted with all of her hard work.”

Apparently the apple (or rather, the “love apple,” as tomatoes are sometimes called) doesn’t fall far from the tree. Anyone who has spoken with Tipton, a small eloquent woman, might be surprised to learn that she learned to speak English just ten years ago. She married Bruce Tipton in 1995, and upon moving to North Carolina in 2000, she enrolled at Blue Ridge Community College. She had started to teach herself to read and write English in the late ‘90s because she wanted to communicate with her American-born mother-in-law (whom she affectionately calls “Nana”). In the beginning, she read magazines with a dictionary by her side and looked up words she didn’t know. Then, at BRCC, she excelled in her classes and was named president of the student honor society, graduating with a 3.86 GPA.

On the farm, Tipton waxes poetic about her favorite varieties. “I would say the Chocolate Stripes tomato,” she says, praising its solid, dark mahogany and green-striped flesh and smoky-sweet flavor. Suddenly, she is on a roll, adding to the list with glee. “I like the tiny yellow pear tomatoes,” she says. “And the black cherry which looks like a grape? Oh! That one is so sweet! You can pick and pick and not put anything in your basket. And the brown berry, it has an almost meaty, smoky taste…” She loves to pull fresh tomatoes from the plant and eat them.

Tipton seems just as smitten with farming traditions and the idea of heirlooms as she does the tomatoes themselves. With heirlooms, “the seed has passed from generation to generation. You feel the history of it and the legacy of it,” she says. “The tomatoes tell a story. If we don’t take care of them, our future generations won’t get to know them.”  

For more information about the Tomato Art Company and Hilda Tipton’s partnership with the National Breast Cancer Foundation, call 828-288-2895. For more on Chip Hope’s heirloom tomatoes, go to www.appalachianseeds.com.