For Sale: Heirloom Tomato Plants

by Darrell Merrell

Here’s a charming guest article for our newsletter by Oklahoma’s own “Tomato Man”, Darrell Merrell. Darrell departed this earth on April 24, 2008, at the age of 69. His obituary tells a bit about his wonderful life. Darrell was instrumental in the discovery of Cherokee Green, which emerged from the sample of Cherokee Chocolate sent to me in 1997. Enjoy this peek into his entry into selling tomato plants in his area.

_______________

On a cold winter’s night of February 1993 I was thumbing through my treasure of new seed catalogs when an idea suddenly popped into my head. It came while studying the heirloom tomato seed section when I though, “You know, nurseries no longer sell these plants. I bet if people could get them they would love them as much as I do. Maybe I ought to grow a few and see if they will sell!”

Not having a greenhouse, I started by planting several flats in my kitchen. Soon I had flats of seedlings and transplants scattered throughout the house. On warm days I would carry them outside to bathe in the bright sunshine and then tote them back in at night. Until mid-April, when it was warm enough to leave them outside at night, I was spending an hour each morning and each evening moving them out and carrying them in. since I live alone, having tomato plants scattered all around the house was no problem. I reveled in it.

Late on a March afternoon while transplanting at my kitchen work table I received a call from Aunt Vera. Vera is a feisty, independent little lady in her 80’s. “What are you doing?” “Transplanting tomato plants, I replied.” “Getting them ready for your garden, huh?” “Yes,” said I. “How many do you have?” “Oh, about 1500.” “What,” she exclaimed, “what in the world are you going to do with 1,500 tomato plants?” “Well, I’m going to plant some and try to sell the rest.” Then she asked, “Where are you putting them?” “All over the house; on the kitchen table, in the bedroom, in the living room…anywhere I can find a place to set a flat.” She began to laugh and giggle…and laugh. She really got a big kick out of the picture in her mind’s eye. “I’ll guess we’ll have to start calling you ‘The Tomato Man’. And that came to be the name I eventually adopted for my business.

It was a natural progression from other business names I have used. While raising a family of three children I have been a stockbroker, a bank trust officer and then for ten years the owner of doughnut shops where I became known as ‘The Doughnut Man’. In January of 1990 I sold (gave away) my doughnut business and moved back to the old homestead in Tulsa. My father had passed away the previous year; my mother was 80 years old and in seriously bad health and my sister, five years older than I, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Mom and Sis were living together but unable to take care of themselves, let alone each other. I became their caretaker, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a period of 4 years and 9 months. They are now both deceased.

The best emotional, spiritual and physical outlets for me were reading and gardening. The first year I grew the standard varieties of hybrid tomatoes, but I got to thinking of the open-pollinated varieties we grew when I was a kid. The only names I could recall were Sioux, Rutgers and Homestead, but I sure remembered them tasting better than hybrids.

Through Organic Gardening magazine I found a few seed companies that were selling heirloom tomato seeds. I was hooked. I began to become more concerned with genetic diversity and the environment and began switching, more and more, to organic gardening practices. I soon concluded that we as gardeners had been and are being “sold down the river” by the industrial complex of chemical fertilizer and hybrid seed companies. So, I switched entirely to open-pollinated and heirloom vegetable plants.

The question of how I could make a contribution to the furtherment of a safer environment and the preservation of genetic diversity often occurred to me. When the idea of selling heirloom tomato plants dawned on me. I had my answer. We, as avid gardeners, generally prefer to start our own plants from seed but most gardeners do not. They buy transplants!

I already had in mind a market outlet. Since my sister’s death in October, 1993, I had sold books on Saturdays at the Tulsa Flea Market, reputedly one of the top ten flea markets in the United States. From ‘The Doughnut Man’ I had become ‘The Book Man’. It was natural for Aunt Vera and others to begin calling me ‘The Tomato Man’. My plan was to begin selling plants in mid-April, the prime time to plants in our area. But my plans changed.

A local nurseryman asked me to operate a Fruit and Vegetable Stand. It was guaranteed income so I accepted with the proviso that I could sell my heirloom tomato plants at the stand. I explained to him what heirlooms were and he looked at me in disbelief when I told him I expected to charge one dollar per plant; he was getting 89 cents for four hybrid plants! I didn’t know whether they would sell or not but I was willing to give it a try. Each day I sold a few, and I mean sold! I had to explain to each potential customer what an heirloom tomato was and what their virtues were compared to hybrids.

Then the best kind of advertising came my way…free advertising in the form of a newspaper article. A feature writer for the local newspaper, the Tulsa World, was referred to me when she asked the nurseryman about heirlooms. While her article primarily featured hybrids, there was a small column on heirlooms and ‘The Tomato Man’. I was swamped. Gardeners drove from a distance of over 100 miles to buy my plants. I wa sin a state of euphoria and the nurseryman was aghast with amazement. Shortly thereafter I left the “stand” and placed a sign by my front gate that said “Heirloom Tomato Plants.”

Previously I had transplanted into small one-inch square cups and sold the plants for one dollar. I learned that the small cups were too small for proper root growth so I switched to 4” pots and upped the price to $2 each. Sound greedy? I think not. Demand was exceeding supply, it cost much more for a 4” pot and I was selling a larger and healthier plant. Even a “hermit” has to pay his bills and this was my only source of income.

The most popular sellers were of course the ones I liked and had experience growing; Pink Brandywine, Yellow Brandyiwne, Pruden’s Purple, Cherokee Purple, Burbank, Abraham Lincoln, German Johnson, Riesentraube and Radiator Charie’s Mortgage Lifter, along with others for a total of 20 varieites. They were good tomatoes all and some had colorful histories; they were fun to sell.

For the remainder of the year and through March of 1995 I reverted back to being ‘The Book Man’ on Saturdays at the Tulsa Flea Market. But most of the time was devoted to the 39 varieties of heirloom tomatoes in my garden. Through Seed Savers Exchange I purchased Suzanne Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed and using the fermentation method she described I saved thousands of tomato seeds.

Seed saving is very important to me. It is one method I use to ensure that I offer the best plants possible for the climate in this area. Most of the plants that I grow are grown from my own saved seed. After a few seasons, it generally takes three, by saving seed from the best fruit from the best vines I have noticed a marked improvement in production and quality in several varieties, especially my favorite…Pink Brandywine. I am a believer in acclimatization.

Though this is not an article concerning the technical aspects of tomato culture, I do want to encourage new subscribers to Off the Vine to read three articles in two back issues that have been helpful to me. In Volume I, #3, Isolation Distances for Tomatoes, by Jeff McCormack, and Saving Seeds, by Carolyn Male; also in Volume I, #3, Adaptation of Tomatoes by John P. Rahart.

Since the groundwork had been laid for a greater sales year in 1995 I needed to move my operations out of the kitchen. A friend who had experience in building greenhouses helped me build a 13’X40’X8’ hoop greenhouse in return for my helping him with a greenhouse he was building. We finished my greenhouse in mid-March, 1995. I had already begun planting in the kitchen and had several flats to move into their new home. With some volunteer help I continued to plant until I had some 30 varieties to sell. To the varieties already named from last year I added Red Brandywine, Eva Purple Ball, 1984, Red Rose, Arkansas Traveler, Wins All, Hughs, Persimmon and several others. The second Saturday in April I took plants to the Flea Market and was greeted by a repeat customer from last year who told me that the plants he got from me the previous year grew the best tomatoes he’d ever tasted. What a great way to start the year.

Fortune continued to shine. The Tulsa World published a second article about my tomatoes entitled “South Tulsan Grows Tomatoes of Yore”, and it even had a color photo of me inside the greenhouse holding a flat of plants. The next Saturday at the Brookside Herb Day in Tulsa I sold 1,200 tomato plants!

The demand was so great that I could not possibly transplant enough seedlings so my next-door neighbors, the Coheas, and I organized a transplant party for a Sunday afternoon. About 15 of our friends gathered and transplanted some 2,000 seedlings and we capped off the day with a BBQ and fried chicken dinner. My brother Kenneth, from Mobile, Alabama, drove up to help. He became so enamored that he stayed for three weeks. My daughter Lisa came up from Dallas and spent 10 days helping me through the Sand Springs Herbal Affair, the largest one day plant sale in the Southwest.

I rented a large U-haul moving van, loaded it with 6,000 plants and headed for Sand Springs, a suburb of Tulsa. The previous year the fair had drawn 25,000 gardeners to purchase from 40 or so vendors. But neither lady luck nor the Sun shone that day it rained all day, with a cold wind gusting to 30 mpg, and the temperature struggled to a high of only 59. I brought home 5,500 plants! If that was not bad enough, the same thing happened two weeks later at the First Annual Oklahoma City Herb Festival.

Nevertheless, through the Flea Market and sales from home I had a fine year. I also had added other heirloom vegetables to sell; basil, peppers, eggplants, watermelon, cucumbers, and two vining flowers. I had a lot of happy repeat customers who referred new customers. In addition to publicity from the newspaper article my heirloom tomatoes were mentioned on two radio programs and a local TV station did a 3 minute feature story in early July.

Best of all was the pleasure given to me by happy customers such as the young man who showed me two tomatoes and said they were the best he had ever tasted but that he had lost the markers and didn’t know the names. Fortunately they were easy to identify…Cherokee Purple and Red Brandywine.

Perhaps my favorite incident was one in which I did not directly participate. On Memorial Day weekend my friend Charlie was minding store at home while I was at the Flea Market. About mid-day an elderly lady pulled into the driveway in a late model luxury car. It seems that her husband had recently died and she wanted to do something special in his memory. He just loved tomatoes, both in the growing and the eating. Did we have anything suitable to decorate his grave? When she spotted a gallon pot containing a large Cherokee Purple she knew that was just the thing. She said she was going to wrap it in foil and ripen and place it on his grave. It’s a story that tugs at the heartstrings but I like to let my mischievous imagination play with this one. Imagine that she left the potted Cherokee Purple until it was cleanup time at the cemetery and the attendant spirited it home to his garden. When the fruit ripened to a reddish-brown purple he must have though that his graveyard tomato surely had crossed from the Great Beyond.

In truth, what heavenly plants are these old time tomatoes. To me they aureate with mysticism and spirituality. This reverence keeps me mindful of Henry David Thoreau’s admonition in his marvelous Walden: “trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.” My efforts then must not be for notoriety, or fame, or even money; though in and of themselves not bad things, but each good things to have. The Seed Savers Exchange motto says it best, “Passing on our vegetable heritage.” I am mindful of this when I give away at least one plant to most customers and with large orders I give away several plants of different varieties.

We as gardeners and I, in particular, owe a debt of heart-felt gratitude to past gardeners and countless others for their preservation and perpetuation efforts, the gardening magazines that continue to spread the word about heirlooms, the seed saving organizations, the small companies now specializing in heirloom seeds, and last but not least Carolyn and Craig for this publication Off The Vine. In my own small way I have carried the cause just one step further by providing the live plant to the backyard gardener. Surely some will catch the fever and pass it on.

_____________

This is truly a wonderful article. For those of us who, through the years, found ourselves peddling our over-planted seedlings from our yard, or from flea or farmers markets, there is a lot here that will seem very familiar. It also reminds me of how our little Off The Vine work allowed us to cross paths with many like minded, wonderful souls.