Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

Heirloom is perhaps best served in the hands of obsessed foodies who crave behind-the-scenes tours of small organic farms, beyond what Food & Wine magazine teases. For gardeners, Heirloom is welcome and amusing company of crazy. Without pretense or rehearsed narrative, Stark recounts his humble initiations into organic farming (and supplying top chefs in NYC), knowing very little about it, other than what his obsessions demand. His misadventures amuse. It's not perfect writing, yet it is exactly those imperfections that endear this find. Detours from the narrative will surprise and delight. Unexpected passages include how Mennonite neighbors coach Stark in farming, auction etiquette and small engine repair. (The last paragraph in that chapter is especially moving.) And vignettes give depth and color to an unlikely cast of characters who help Stark plant, pick, sell and save his crops. Best of all, Stark unearths a family history that gives context and perhaps motivation to his madness. While it is all true, it reads like fiction, a story that you'll surely recommend and remember. A fantastic late-summer read and welcome winter remedy for gardening/foody obsessives that crave the first signs of Spring.

Being interested in one day changing careers from financial industry to the vegetable industry, I could identify with the author. This is really a "How To" book on starting an Heirloom vegetable business, only written in a storytelling fashion. Every chapter exudes the author's passion.

Tim Stark was an aspiring author doing various makeweight jobs in New York City when he got preoccupied with trying to raise heirloom tomatoes in his Brooklyn apartment. When his landlord put his foot down, Stark relocated his tomatoes and himself to his boyhood home in Lenhartsville, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, which is within the farming region of the Pennsylvania Dutch and about a two-hour drive from NYC (assuming no traffic jams). HEIRLOOM recounts Stark's ten or so years raising organic produce -- principally, heirloom tomatoes, but also chile peppers and sugar snap peas among many others -- on a few acres in Pennsylvania and then selling his produce at the Union Square Greenmarket and to some of the best restaurants in New York City. Stark confronts an endless succession of obstacles and problems -- ignorance, weather, inadequate and balky equipment, lack of ready cash, insufficient labor, an obstreperous jerk of a neighbor, and insects, deer, and gophers -- each of which he somehow overcomes, or circumvents, or, at a minimum, learns to live with. Thankfully (for me, at least), Stark does not dwell on tedious agricultural details. This is not a gardener's journal; if anything, it probably is of greater interest to the appreciative consumer of organic farming than the practitioner. Interesting subjects discussed at some length are the Amish and Mennonites of the area, the farmer/chef relationships that have developed and undergird some of the most noted restaurants in NYC, and the bleak future for similar agricultural operations catering to urban markets, due to shrinking affordable farmland. Stark's writing is above average, occasionally quite good, but it is uneven and at times a little disjointed and unnecessarily confusing. The last chapter in particular seems rushed. Stark should have given the book one more thorough review and revision, but I suspect that would have been asking too much of his rather restless personality. Still, HEIRLOOM is an enjoyable sketch of an interesting slice of contemporary Americana that can be read in a day or two.

I just ordered this book today so I can't comment on it per se. However I met Tim in November of '06 and spent about a week with him at an Agriturisimo in Cortona, Italy and can say he was a wonderfully laid back, knowledgable and articulate character who had just had his first article printed in Gourmet Magazine. He also has a number of blogs on Gourmet's Epicurious site and has a very entertaining article in the newest issue of Gourmet itself about manning his pepper stand at the farmers' market. Without even seeing it I am sure "Heirloom" is well worth the read. I believe he's been writing even longer than he's been farming.