GARDEN DETECTIVE: Deer Park Porterhouse wins Tomato Challenge
2009 Great LI Tomato Challenge
The Great Long Island Tomato Challenge 2009
Four point nine. That's what the scale read on Aug. 28 when Harold Politano of Deer Park weighed his winning entry at the third annual Great Long Island Tomato Challenge: 4 pounds, 9 ounces. To help illustrate how very unusually large that is, I'll point out that most average-size store-bought hothouse tomatoes generally weigh in at around 4 ounces. This one was more than 18 times that weight. So picture a pile of 18 average-sized, store-bought tomatoes and you'll have a visual of Politano's Burpee Porterhouse.
>> Photos from the 2009 Great Long Island Tomato Challenge
Earlier in the evening, the standing-room-only crowd of successful tomato growers in Newsday's auditorium was impressed - and rightly so - by the imposing presence of incumbent Tomato King John Salvador's 3 pound, 1 ounce Bull's Heart tomato, grown in Port Jefferson Station.
The admiration grew stronger when Billy King of Mastic Beach weighed his 3 pound, 4 ounce "Domingo" tomato, so named by King because he acquired the seeds from 2007 winner Vincenzo Domingo.
And when Kim Politano, Harold's daughter, placed her Big Zac on the scale, digital and cell phone cameras surfaced, almost on cue, as she posed with her 4 pound, 2 ounce beauty. I suppose the tomato doesn't fall far from the vine, so to speak.
Among the 52 entrants this year were Tom Long of Massapequa Park, whose Big Zac weighed in a 2 pounds, 8.5 ounces, and Bill Jordan of Amityville, whose 2 pound, 6 ounce Big Zac wasn't far behind. Only eight others broke the 2-pound mark, significant for a tomato under normal circumstances. But with Politano in the field, there was nothing normal about these circumstances.
Politano, 58, an aircraft optical screener, is a tomato-growers' tomato grower who puts his heart and soul into his garden. He invented a double-unit support system for his plants using wire fencing and chicken wire and makes little slings out of pantyhose for the tomatoes when they become too heavy for the vines to support. In short, he babies them. "I've been growing tomatoes for 10 years," Politano said, adding that he's always aimed for big ones.
His secret? "You have to concentrate on getting all the juice into that one big flower that comes out," he divulged. "Everything else is sacrificed: You cut off all the other flowers and keep only one stem, cutting away all the smaller stems."
Last week, he cut away all the competition.
>> Photos from the 2009 Great Long Island Tomato Challenge
