For the Growers of Heirloom Tomatoes, These Are the Salad Days of Summer

Your Early Girl is the tomato for the competitor, that Washington type who needs to win, wants the scoop, will come home to hold that baby aloft and smirk across the backyard fence. Not great eating, your Early Girl, but first, yes.

The true tomatohead disdains the Early Girl. She's not even in the garden. True tomatoheads worship the heirlooms, your Cherokee Purple, your Aunt Lillian, your Aunt Ruby, with her faint blush at the bottom.

The heirlooms are the fruit of yesteryear, fat and happy globes of seduction, all yielding flesh and bursting flavor, and their time is now. Those bewitched by them do not leave town deep in August. Their summer is ordered by the rhythm of ripening. They rejoice in the hot sun that leaves everyone else muttering, and they harvest their bounty. They eat them standing up at the kitchen sink, letting the juice run down their chins. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, all tomatoes all the time.

"I'm in tomato heaven these days," says Pat Sullivan, a psychiatric nurse case manager who has her personal stock behind her Baltimore house and 55 more plants on two other plots nearby. "I planned my vacation for June. Now, it's just too intense. It's such a big responsibility, all these tomatoes." She has to pick not only the fruit but also the recipents.

"I'm very particular as to whom I give my tomatoes," she says. "I do not believe you give your tomatoes away to an unappreciative audience." She's heard that one friend's brothers "have taken these tomatoes in bags and just leave them at work. That is a sacrilege! These tomatoes must be appreciated. They must be worshiped."

If you have been given Sullivan's tomatoes and do not call her to say they were the best tomatoes you ever ate, "well," she says, "you're not getting them again." And why tomatoes? "They're easier to deal with than men," Sullivan says.

Like most collectors, serious tomato hobbyists are reluctant to acknowledge their obsession, even after repeatedly falling asleep on winter nights with seed catalogues resting on their chests. Of course they must have the Purple Calabash that Thomas Jefferson might have grown at Monticello! Or the Black Krim, maroon and green, from Russia! The Nebraska Wedding! The Pink Accordion, with its heavily ruffled sides! The Riesentraube, a German winemaker's cherry tomato that grows in clusters of 40. ("Can't wait to make my first batch of tomato wine!" posts an enthusiast on a tomato Web forum.)

"I don't know that 'fanatical' is the proper adjective," protests Sheryl Hovey, then allows that when she and her husband were house-hunting, "one of the absolute requirements was proper sunlight. A lot of people think that is weird."

And: There are 15 plants in the garden by their house in Oakton and, outside it, another 15 or 20 volunteer plants that seeded from last year's burst fruit -- "my husband says pull them out, but we tend to leave them in; we're sick" -- and more in pots all around the deck. "So 30 or 40," she says. "Not too many."

"I'm not a fanatic," insists Pat Brodowski, who, as historian and educator at the Carroll County Farm Museum in Westminster, Md., plants and tends the heirloom kitchen garden there. This year she planted 24 tomato varieties, which is scaled back from last year's 70. Why, she knows one woman who has more than 100 varieties, and another who drove up to the museum one day, her VW packed to the roof with 60 plants grown from seed.

An exploration of the tomatohead world leads to Lawrence Davis-Hollander, a Massachusetts ethnobotanist, who grows about 80 varieties a year and founded the Eastern Native Seed Conservancy, a seed-saving and propagation program.

Fanatics, he explains, are "the serious people with their own pet list. They have grown three or four or five thousand varieties over their lifetime. They completely have other jobs. They save and keep organized all those seeds. Those are the fanatics."