Tomato WOW

One of our large greenhouses is devoted to tomatoes, including one that has become very much our own.

Many years ago, we began with organic Brandywine tomatoes. Instead of buying new seed after each crop, we saved seeds from our harvest and planted them again. We continued doing this generation after generation, always selecting seeds from the tomatoes we most wanted to continue.

Over the years, something remarkable happened. The tomatoes developed a taste and presence quite unlike anything we had experienced before. We don't know precisely what occurred genetically along the way, and frankly, it has never seemed particularly important. We simply know what comes out of the greenhouse.

We call it Tomato WOW because that is what happens when people taste one. Again and again, someone takes the first bite and, almost involuntarily, says, “Wow!” Eventually, the name simply stuck.

Like everything else we grow here, the tomatoes are part of the larger ecology of the property. They are fed with organic fertilizer we produce ourselves and irrigated with the same structured water used throughout the estate.

And they have one additional ingredient that is perhaps a little less conventional.

We play Mozart adagios in the greenhouse.

Over the years we have watched the plants appear to lean toward the source of the music. Whether Mozart has anything whatsoever to do with the extraordinary flavor of the tomatoes, we make no claim. But the plants seem to enjoy it, we certainly enjoy it, and after all these years we see no reason to change the recipe.

Seeds from Tomato WOW continue to be saved from one generation to the next. When the property passes to its new owners, the tomatoes—and the seeds that carry their history forward—will remain here with it.