Heirloom tomato growers team up By BETH VELLIQUETTE : The Herald-Sun chh@herald-sun.com Aug 10, 2001 : 8:37 pm ET

HILLSBOROUGH -- Larry Bohs has a collection of cups on his kitchen counter that are filled with scummy, moldy stuff that he and his friend Joe Clayton take great pains to save.

Bohs and Clayton, who live near each other on Palmers Grove Church Road, northeast of Hillsborough, have teamed up to grow tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes. Bohs starts them, and Clayton tends them.

The tag-team tomato duo grow most of their own food, with tomatoes as their specialty. Although they grow some hybrids, like Early Girl and Better Boy, their main interest is in growing heirloom tomatoes from seed.

Growing heirloom tomatoes and saving the seeds is a way people preserve the thousands of tomato varieties that trace back hundreds of years. Without the seed savers, many varieties would disappear since most of the large commercial seed companies sell only a limited variety of seeds.

"You can save the seeds from these called ‘open pollinated tomatoes,’ which means they breed true if you save the seeds," Bohs said. "These are interesting varieties that are not bred for transportation or being sold in the stores. They have characteristics you can’t find everywhere."

The process starts with the seeds, which is where the scummy, moldy stuff comes in.

"We get a fairly nice tomato, scoop out the seeds and put them in a cup," Bohs said. "We put water over them and let them sit and ferment for a week or so.

"The fermentation process makes the seeds more viable, and it cleans them up," he said as he pointed to rows of plastic cups. "These are all in different states of molding. The good seeds come to the bottom, and the bad seeds stay on top."

Bohs, who teaches a biomedical engineering course at Duke, keeps records of the different tomato varieties, noting the sweetness or acidity of each one, when they ripened, their size and what they looked like.

"I keep track of all these things on a spreadsheet," he said.

Once the seeds are fermented, Bohs dries them and puts them away for the spring planting.

Bohs is a member of the Seed Saver Exchange, which includes thousands of people across the country who save seeds from all types of fruits and vegetables. He lists some of his seeds and can order other seeds from other seed savers when he wants to try something new.

In late winter or early spring, Bohs plants the seeds and grows them into seedlings, then he hands most of them over to Clayton, who has a big sunny garden compared to Bohs small shady garden in the woods.

The two men met shortly after Clayton, the solid waste field coordinator for Orange County, bought a farmhouse near Bohs’ house.

"He came down and said he was allowed to eat all my figs," Clayton said. "There was a conveyance from the old owner for him to eat the figs. I thought it was very ingenious."

As the two men joked Thursday, they discovered that some of the figs on Clayton’s large fig tree were ripe, and they both began to pluck them and eat them.

Once the plants are transferred to Clayton’s raised bed gardens, he takes over, spending three to four hours a day after work in the garden taking care of the tomatoes, as well as a huge variety of other vegetables, fruit trees and berry bushes.

When the tomatoes start to ripen, Clayton goes to work in the kitchen, canning and drying the tomatoes. The trained chef who now works in recycling also makes plenty of pasta sauce and salsa using the herbs and other vegetables from his garden.

"There’s not much we don’t do with tomatoes around here," he said, opening his cabinets to show jars and jars of tomatoes.

Last year, he canned 200 jars of tomatoes, and so far this year, he’s canned 100.

Clayton rarely carries vegetables to work to give out to friends, although visitors to his home likely will go home with something.

"I don’t carry vegetables to people," he said with a laugh. "You have to come out and pick them. You can only be so lazy and be my friend."

One of their favorite tomatoes is something they call Rainbow Brandywine, although it’s a variation of Lucky Cross. Bohs obtained the seeds from a friend and has stabilized the plant over a couple of seasons of growing it.

Another unusual plant is called tomatillo, a small green tomato from Mexico that grows inside what looks like a tiny paper lantern. Plucking them from the vine, the two men licked their lips as they popped them in their mouths.

Both men use organic methods and say that each year the number of bugs has decreased.

"Two years ago, we had millions of tomato cut worms," Clayton said. "Last year we had 20, and this year I killed one, and Larry killed two."

Despite the intensive labor, growing the tomatoes is a labor of love for the two friends.

"We eat tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner," Clayton said.

-- Anonymous, August 11, 2001