Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

242 Pages·2008·1.07 MB·English

by  Tim Stark

This book has been optimized for viewing

at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.

H
E I R LOO M

NOTES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL

TOMATO FARMER

TIM STARK

BROADWAY BOOKS

NEW YORK
published by broadway books
Copyright © 2008 by Tim Stark
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Broadway,

an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.broadwaybooks.com

broadway books and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal,

are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for

permission to reprint material in this book:

Excerpt from “Blackberry-Picking” from Opened Ground: Selected

Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus

Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

These essays have appeared in slightly different form in the

following publications:

“Groundhog Days” and “The Misunderstood Habenero” in Gourmet.

“The Tomato People” in the Washington Post.

These essays were read in slightly different form on the following program:

“The Tomato People” and “A Farm Grows in Brooklyn” on

NPR’s This I Believe.

Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate/Abbate Design
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stark, Tim.

Heirloom : notes from an accidental tomato farmer /

by Tim Stark. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Stark, Tim. 2. Tomato growers—

Pennsylvania—Biography. 3. Tomatoes—Heirloom

varieties—Pennsylvania. I. Title.

SB349.S73 2008

635'.642092—dc22

[B] 2007048075

eISBN: 978–0-7679–3006–2

v1.0
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Contents
A Farm Grows in Brooklyn.........................................................1

A Brief History of Farming at Eckerton Hill .............................. 7

Tomato People ........................................................................ 39

Once Upon a Sugar Snap ........................................................ 94

Harvesting the DMZ .............................................................105

The Misunderstood Habanero ................................................116

Among the Mennonites ..........................................................128

Truck Patch ............................................................................ 147

Groundhog Days .................................................................... 153

Abu Groundhog Revisited ...................................................... 159

Dead of Winter ...................................................................... 172

So You Think You Want to Be a Farmer? ................................ 177

Acknowledgments .................................................................. 231