When I was a boy, my brother and I spent many summer mornings hoeing in my grandfather’s half acre garden. We’d each get paid a quarter and split a bottle of Pepsi. Those mornings began my relationship with tomatoes. Fresh sliced tomatoes were served almost every meal they were in season, and my mother and grandmother canned lots of tomatoes each year.
Julie and I planted a garden the first year we were married, and tomatoes were a primary crop from the beginning. A year later, spring of 1976, I was working for a wholesale tree farm and...