A WIDE VARIETY
Grower revels in the beauty, diversity, flavors of home-grown tomatoes
Afarm in East Greenville, Montgomery County, is a testament to what respecting the earth can yield. Row after row in the fields at Rainbow Tomatoes Garden, you’ll find a colorful, immensely varied crop — from shiny, midnight purple to dumpling-shaped to ruby red, all grown chemical-free and without irrigation or use of any plastic materials. A total of 320 varieties of tomatoes will come to life this summer, ripened by the heat of the sun. But it’s not yield that is the priority of grower Dan Waber. “I chose each of the varieties for flavor,” says Waber, as he lined up nearly a hundred types of tomatoes the day we stopped by. A visit to his Rainbow Tomatoes Garden is a wonderful opportunity to try varieties you’ll never find elsewhere in the Valley.
Think of it as going for a tasting, then coming home with your favorites (much the same way you do at your favorite local winery.) Experience in different careers converge in his sustainable agricultural operation. His emphasis on depth of flavor comes from his background as a professional chef in Chicago. His eagerness to share the background on each variety of tomato comes from his work in marketing, promoting the uniqueness of the handcrafted work of artisans. His crops are grown sustainably, using “dry farming,” where no irrigation is used to keep plants hydrated. Instead, Waber uses cultivating techniques that make the most of what Mother Nature provides. The theory: Allowing the tomatoes to thirst concentrates the sugars within, producing a more flavorful tomato. “I want my tomatoes to taste good and work for their water,” Waber says. He also uses zero plastic and each tomato plant is staked using bamboo and twine. No chemicals are used either, so you’ll see weeds around his field, along with numerous fluttering butterflies and other pollinators. What he’s growing, which is bewildering, is just a fraction of the total number of tomato varieties (10,000). He’s picked each for the unique flavor it brings. You’ll see lumpy, bumpy tomatoes, some that appear to be hand-painted with stripes of color, sunny yellow ones, several kinds shaped like tear drops and multi-hued tomatoes. He’s eager to have visitors taste his hardto-find tomatoes. One variety he shared on our visit: “Garden Peach,” a strangely fuzzy yellow tomato, slightly larger but similar in shape to a golf ball with a delightful juicy, citrusy flavor. He also showed us “Green Bee,” a diminutive perpetually green tomato that is crunchy, like a pear. Waber wants people to enjoy the wealth of flavors from his fields — and learn more to hopefully propagate the concept of growing unique varieties in their own gardens.