Dish

In the Red
Summer approaches the city on a bank of fog, which means (apart from heavy coats on July evenings) problems for urban tomato growers. The tomato is a semitropical plant whose seeds need soil temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit just to germinate, according to Kate Stadem of Shepherd's Garden Seeds in the Santa Cruz mountain town of Felton.

And warm soil is just the beginning. The seedlings need a lot of full-spectrum light, well-drained soil, regular watering, and nighttime temperatures of at least 50 F. The city's marine climate pretty much precludes the risk of nighttime freezes, meaning that plants can be set out earlier than in other places (such as Felton, where, according to Stadem, there was frost on the ground one late-March morning); but abundant sunlight and daytime heat are another matter.

One answer is to grow one of the wide variety of cherry tomatoes. They are "well-suited to grow in the city's climate," Stadem says, "because they don't demand as much warmth" to thrive. Her personal favorite (and Dish's): the Sungold, a Japanese hybrid that produces vast quantities of brilliant, golden-orange fruit with an explosively sweet flavor.

Another possibility is one of the several varieties of plum or pear tomatoes, the oblong kind often used to make sauce. "We get rave reports from all around the country about our San Remo plum tomato," Stadem says. "It produces and produces -- it doesn't stop. And it's disease-resistant." (One of the most common tomato blights in this area, according to Stadem, is blossom-end rot, which results from uneven watering. Tomatoes like their water supply to be consistent, so that the soil neither dries out nor becomes soggy.)

If you want a good old-fashioned red tomato that will fit in the palm of your hand, Stadem recommends the Oregon Spring. "It's been developed and bred for cooler climates," she says. "It bears fruit earlier than other varieties, and it has a decidedly superior flavor to the San Francisco Fogger" -- another variety famous for producing big red tomatoes in chilly gray summers.

Oregon Spring is an "open" or naturally pollinated type of tomato, as are the "heirloom" tomatoes (those whose genetic line is known not to have changed since 1940). Many other modern varieties (including San Remo and Sungold) are hybrids produced by deliberate cross-pollination. These plants "produce true in the first generation only," Stadem says. "Typically in the next generation, the plants revert to the less positive characteristics of the parent varieties. You never know what you're going to get." All this means that there's no point saving seeds from hybrid tomatoes you've grown (as Dish once tried to do). Stick to the seed packets.

By Paul Reidinger