![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() so it really caught the eye of restaurants and a lot of customers. "At that time, nobody was growing that kind of variety. "We had an incredible crop of, say, 60 varieties of tomatoes," he says. Stark considers himself lucky because his first year was surprisingly smooth. Twelve years later, he farms tomatoes like Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra and Garden Peach on 12 acres. That's when tomatoes took over his life, as he describes in his new book, Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Farmer. In 1996, he started growing tomatoes on a whim, growing several thousand plants in his fourth-floor walk-up. He started out as a management consultant and would-be writer. Stark did not imagine he would be a tomato farmer. ![]() Stark tells NPR's Melissa Block that it's the ugly tomatoes - the ones that "tend to split and crack and get beaten up a lot" - that taste the best. His tomatoes are sliced and diced and stacked on dinner plates of the finest restaurants in New York. This week, Stark trucked 100 varieties of tomatoes from his farm in Pennsylvania to the Union Square market in Manhattan. It's peak tomato season, which means it's the busiest, sweatiest, most backbreaking time of the year for self-described "accidental tomato farmer" Tim Stark. ![]()
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