A Cornfield Grows in Brooklyn: Tomatoes Also Grow in Brooklyn

Whether the corn works out or not, there's another set of plants on my roof. My original inspiration for urban gardening came from that other harbinger of summer: The Tomato.

I've been a tomato lover my whole life, but my perspective on the fruit (that's right, I said ‘fruit’!) changed in 2007 when I had this incredible tomato salad in Greece:

Now THAT's a tomato.

These tomatoes were a deep vermilion all the way through. They were bursting with flavor. They made the watery bland orange Florida thing we New Yorkers call “tomatoes” look and taste like an entirely different species.

I never thought I'd have a chance to savor anything like that salad again (and the several like it I had on the remainder of that trip.) But then my wife and I spent a few years in southern California.

For our first three years in Los Angeles, we lived in Silver Lake, and we had an organic farmer's market setting up shop on our corner—literally, on our corner—every Saturday morning. We could (and often did) walk to it in our pajamas.

It was at this market that I first tasted California tomatoes. In this case, it was roma (plum) tomatoes from Beylik Farms. They weren't the Greek tomatoes of my dreams, but they were damned close. I bought them by the bagful, and while I cut many into salads, most of them were reduced into a tomato sauce that gave an incredible added dimension to our homemade pizzas.

I became addicted. I actually learned how to can food because of Beylik tomatoes. When we left LA, we had five or six pints of my tomato sauce make the trip east with us. And I resolved to try to find some way to replicate those luscious Beylik orbs in Brooklyn, going so far as to harvest dozens of seeds from our last few batches.

I've grown tomatoes in our backyard before, to disappointing results. As I mentioned in my inaugural post, only four hours of sun back there. Tomatoes need a lot more light to become truly dazzling.

So next to the corn are two tomato planters. In them I'll be growing 8 tomato plants this summer: two each of Beylik Roma, Beylik Japanese, San Marzano, and Thessaloniki (in a nod to Greece). Whatever happens with the corn (wind, rodents, who knows what?), I am confident of a spectacular tomato harvest later this year.

I started the tomato seeds indoors the first week of April, along with some lettuce plants, cucumbers, and herbs:

Today, I planted the first four plants—two San Marzanos, two Beylik. I'm not sure if they were the Beylik Romas or Japanese, but I'll find out later in the summer.

I set up a small screen with some cheesecloth to protect the new transplants from wind and the mid-day harshest sun, and I gave them a good drink of water.