my name is neal

I love home grown tomatoes.

I was raised by my grandparents in Arkansas and my grandfather grew the reddest, most juicy tomatoes you can imagine. When I left home for college, I learned how bad a tomato can be. I started timing a visit home each year for when the tomatoes would be ripe.

When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother took over the garden, but she bought different seeds. Her tomatoes were better than from a grocery store, but not as good as my grandfathers. I started studying tomatoes and learned all about heirlooms. We lived in an apartment. What I learned couldn’t really be applied in any practical way.

Luria and I moved back to Dallas after we started Geek Brief. Here in Dallas, there is an expensive grocery store called Central Market. They specialize in extremely high quality produce, meat and prepared foods. Our first Summer back, they had heirloom tomatoes on display, and I bought some. They were better than my grandfathers, and they had to be because the biggest one I bought was $8! We bought a couple every week for as long as they were in stock. Cali/Luria, a girl who never liked tomatoes, discovered the elegant brilliance of a tomato sandwich, and we started saving the seeds.

I gave the seeds to my grandmother. She never understood what I was talking about when I tried to explain she should be planting heirlooms. She planted the seeds along with her regular variety from the feed store. The plants grew beautifully, but they bore no fruit. She had made a big deal about planting these tomatoes. She made jokes about bringing them to Dallas to make a fortune selling them for $8 each. Folks at her church started speculating they weren’t really heirlooms. The suspicion was they were hybrids marketed as heirlooms to fool people in Dallas who would pay $8 for a tomato. Even her pastor, Brother Billy, started telling my grandmother the plants would never produce fruit. After all, her regular tomato plants were filled with tomatoes. She decided to pull up my vines.

When she pulled up the first vine, she noticed something. It had a single tomato growing on it. She left the others in place and pretty soon, they were producing tomatoes too.

When they ripened, she realized I was right about heirlooms. The crop from her generation was even better tasting than the generation I bought at Central Market. Last year SHE started saving the seeds. I brought several of the tomatoes back to Dallas last Summer and I saved seeds too. This year, we each have a few hundred of the seeds, and the tomatoes that will be produced from them have a legendary back story.

My goal is to spread the seeds and the story of the $8 Tomatoes around the country so that in a few years they’ll be available everywhere and will be known as $8 Tomatoes.