The Jersey Tomato is Back
May 14, 2008
There are plenty of tomatoes grown in New Jersey. But the real Jersey tomato, with its unforgettable burst of juicy beefiness combined with mouth-puckering tang, practically disappeared from supermarket shelves years ago.
This spring, however, for the first time in decades, you can grow your own. And this summer, you’ll be able to buy fresh vine-ripened honest-to-goodness real Jersey tomatoes from select fruit and vegetable sellers around the state.
The back story: In the 1930s scientists at Rutgers developed the Jersey tomato, with a taste so good that pretty soon even people outside the state became interested. But it was expensive to produce seeds on a commercial scale, because they required controlled pollination of parent plants. And as produce farming became more competitive, New Jersey farmers switched to varieties that shipped well and resisted diseases — but tasted bland. What they grew was “Jersey tomato” in name only.
Then Rutgers decided the time was, uhm, ripe to bring back the original.
Or one of the originals, anyway, because there is no one single type of Jersey tomato. The Rutgers Agricultural Experiment Station developed several types over the years, and for the comeback it picked the Ramapo variety, which it developed in 1968 and has won taste tests against other Jersey strains Rutgers developed, even against classic heirlooms. It’s still not ready for large scale commercial farming, but specialty farms have agreed to grow it and some 40 garden centers around the state now carry transplants for the back yard.
Paul Burke, manager of Hamilton Farms in Boonton Township, says the Ramapo has already been selling briskly even though the first average frost-free date for northern New Jersey, when it is safe to plant, isn’t until tomorrow. Click to hear him talk about the Ramapo taste that makes people eager to start growing the plant.
Hamilton Farms is growing Ramapos on a patch of land, and is one of the retailers that expects to sell them to the public by mid July. So if you are not a gardener, or if deer get to your tomatos before you do, you can still have your Ramapo and eat it too.
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