Jax Farm Project

I think a good place to start this blog would be to first answer the most basic question when it comes to most things: Why is this worth doing? Or, more specifically here, why should it make a difference to you, reading this, that we are growing some of the food that we are feeding the guests of Jax Kitchen ourselves, not even ten miles from the restaurant? It is a fun question to answer, because there are a multitude of different reasons why this is a worthwhile project and so has many different answers. I think it is worth at least mentioning the connection to environmental and health issues, because it is a part of this for me and the reason why it is something that is becoming a small national movement. That having been said, I promise not to preach about these issues because I think that the one reason above all others that you should care, and the one reason I started gardening years ago, is that if you truly love to eat as I do, and want the best tasting food possible you almost have to grow it yourself. Anybody who had a grandmother who grew tomatoes in her backyard can tell you this.

 
       Now, you can of course buy heirloom tomatoes at any of a number of local markets, but unless they were grown nearby, they will be inferior to what was grown locally, and this applies anywhere. There are two categories into which the hundreds of varieties of tomatoes will fall: the hybrid varieties that you will find at the supermarket, and the heirloom varieties of tomato. The varieties of tomatoes that have been developed to be sold in supermarkets have been bred for many qualities that are more important to those who sell them to you than flavor. They have been bred to ripen more quickly, to be able to endure being picked and put in a box for a week as it rumbles across the countryside in a trailer being shipped to a warehouse and then transferred to another trailer to another warehouse, before it is finally put on another truck and then shipped to your local retailer in Tucson, all the while retaining the appropriate redness, which was obtained not by natural ripening, but by exposing early-picked green tomatoes to a chamber full of ethylene gas. These, of course are not heirloom tomatoes, but the answer to why you can’t get a truly superb heirloom tomato other than locally are found here. Heirloom tomatoes varieties were selected by generations of gardeners for two primary reasons: 1) Flavor and 2) Suitability to the local conditions in which they were grown. This being the case, heirloom varieties of tomato just weren’t built to withstand the conditions that the fruit grown by large scale farms are subjected to. They have sweet flesh, but thin skins that break easily and subject them to rot. They have  a perfect balance of sugars and acids, but bruise easily, which shortens their shelf life. They have intense flavor,l but that flavor deteriorates quickly. These are concerns to the farmer in the Imperial Valley who is growing literally tons of fruit, but we as gardeners and diners are concerned about nothing more than flavor and a very short trip to the restaurant, where our tomatoes will most likely be served to you on the same day they are picked. I encourage you to go to any of the local retailers that sell these heirloom tomatoes and to buy a few. They will frequently be either under-ripe, hard and not fully flavored, or they will be soft, bruised and mushy. Am a saying that it’s not possible to get a good heirloom tomato from the store? No, I have had many good heirloom tomatoes purchased from grocery stores. But they have never been as good as what I’ve grown myself. Even if these tomatoes are good, and they sometimes are quite good, they are not the very best that a tomato can be, and you, who care enough about such things to have read this far, definitely deserve the very best that a tomato can be. I cannot promise you a tomato that is better than the one that that was grown by your grandmother in Iowa. But I can promise this: If you come in to Jax Kitchen and eat from the garden menu this summer you will have the best damn tomato that is possible to be grown in the city of Tucson. Look forward to seeing you in the restaurant,
 
Noel