HIGH STAKES CONTEST CHALLENGES GARDENERS
TO NUTURE A PLUMP, HUMONGOUS TOMATO
Right now, the monarch of all tomatoes may be swelling toward ripeness somewhere among the nation's 165 million or so back-yard tomato vines. If it's out there, it's already big, at least the size of a cantaloupe and five times the size any ordinary garden tomato will reach by the end of the season.
The mystery tomato may not be out there at all. But Horace Hagedorn, the chief executive officer of Miracle-Gro fertilizer company, dearly hopes a tomato, any tomato, is spending this summer plumping up toward a record-breaking 7 pounds 12.5 ounces. He has staked $100,000 of his company's money on the notion that a behemoth tomato will show up, and so far it looks as if he'll lose the money.
Not that losing the $100,000 is all that bad; Hagedorn has pledged to donate the amount to the American Red Cross for its disaster relief fund if no enormous tomato surfaces by Dec. 31.
"When we issued the challenge three years ago, I honestly thought three years was long enough to get a record-breaker, but now it turns out I might have been wrong," Hagedorn says. He says that when he first challenged American gardeners to grow a tomato bigger than the biggest-ever--a 7 pound 12 ouncer grown in Oklahoma in 1987--he never expected to actually end up giving the prize money to the Red Cross.
"The Red Cross does a lot of good work, but I hope we do get a winner," Hagedorn says.
TV appearance is a bust
Hagedorn almost got to give his money away last year, when a retired Ohio coal miner grew a 7-pound-plus tomato. Nobody knows precisely how big it got, though, because the whopper burst its seams and started oozing tomato jelly during its appearance on the CBS-TV show "Live with Regis & Kathie Lee."
Its last official weight, while still on the vine, had been 6 pounds 4.16 ounces, but Miracle-Gro's judges determined that by the time it made its small-screen debut, the giant was at least 7 pounds. The gardener, Robert Ehigh, got a $10,000 consolation prize from Miracle-Gro. Ehigh is back at work this year, growing tomatoes from the seeds of prize-winners his wife's great-grandfather grew 60 years ago.
Other contenders include one in the Chicago area who is an agricultural scientist at the University of Illinois Extension Service's field research station in St. Charles.
Bill Shoemaker is watching more than 70 plants dedicated to breaking the record. His biggest tomato ever was about 2 pounds--roughly the same size as Hagedorn's personal best. Typical garden tomatoes run half a pound to a little more than a pound. Shoemaker knows the leap to 7 pounds from his 2-pound notch is huge.
"So far what we have aren't much bigger than 2 pounds, so I'm not optimistic about winning," Shoemaker says.
Nourishing one tomato
Another contender, Helen Burleson of Moline, Ill., didn't know about the contest until July. Burleson has won prizes at the Rock Island County Fair with tomatoes weighing more than 2 pounds. She believes she has grown bigger ones but never bothered to weigh them because she was more concerned with eating them. Alerted to the $100,000 prize, though, Burleson said, "I'll start keeping track of their weights now."
Shoemaker theorizes that whoever wins the contest, if anyone does, will do so by focusing a single plant's resources on nourishing one tomato. All but one fruit will be pinched off before they have a chance to develop, and the vine will be kept to a lone growing stem, with all useless branches lopped off.
The winner, he says, also will have stayed ahead of the tomato plant's almost unslakable thirst and may have assisted the fruit's pollination via an expert procedure that might as well be called "shaking your tomato's booty." This entails tapping the tomato stalk during pollination so it wiggles, thereby loosening lots of pollen and encouraging full pollination, which leads to heartier fruit.
Another key to humongous tomatoes, according to reigning champion Gordon Graham of Oklahoma, is to play country music to tomato plants. Gordon reports that his plants, which grow as high as 12 feet, are partial to Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. It may sound odd, but evidently it works: Graham is the only person who has ever grown a tomato big enough to wear a cowboy hat.
Hagedorn says the winner will need "Miracle-Gro and a lot of luck." His product contributed to the girth of the world-record cantaloupe, cabbage, dahlia, string beans and watermelon. A few years ago he was convinced it would also help grow a massive tomato. Now he's not so sure.
The Miracle-Gro Tomato Challenge will award only one $100,000 prize. It goes to the first record-breaking tomato submitted. To submit a tomato to the judges,
call 516-883-6550 and ask for Rosebud, who will arrange to have the tomato shipped carefully. Ignore the instructions in any brochure that say to mail the tomato to Miracle-Gro. And remember, a winning tomato will have to be truly enormous, about the size of a round watermelon.
