When the time came for the 41st Annual Massachusetts Tomato Contest, Linda Rossi-Raymond of The Raymond Farm in Bernardston had her eye on the prize, but wasn’t sure if her and her husband Ernie Raymond had enough competitors in their crops.
For the first time in 25 years, the pair of lifelong farmers scaled back their tomatoes to allow more time to take care of Rossi-Raymond’s 97-year-old mother Helen Rossi. To compete, the pair needed 12 “perfect, uniform, ripe tomatoes,” Rossi-Raymond said.
On the morning of the competition, she set out for the crops to find 20 ripe sun sugar cherry tomatoes.
“It was a miracle,” she said.
Rossi-Raymond dropped the top 12 tomatoes off at the Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) office, and a member of the organization drove them to the Boston Public Market, where the couple’s tomatoes faced off against 103 entries from 21 farms across the state and placed fourth in the Cherry Category.
“Our Annual Tomato Contest highlights the resilience, dedication, and skill of our farmers, who work year-round to bring fresh, premium produce to our tables despite all the challenges they face,” said Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) Commissioner Ashley Randle in a statement, who serves as the Master of Ceremonies for the competition. “They are vital to our communities and local economies. Choosing local produce means enjoying better flavor while directly supporting the families who sustain our land.”
Rossi-Raymond said sharing the farm’s win with her mother, a lifelong farmer from South Deerfield, made the achievement more meaningful.
“I was praying that she could see us achieve this in her lifetime, so it’s priceless,” Rossi-Raymond said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Antonellis Farm in Deerfield, which sells its tomatoes at the Ciesluk Farm Stand, also competed in the statewide contest with its red deuce tomato. The fruit earned fourth place in the Slicing Category, a competition amongst tomatoes set for sandwiches and salads, Jen Antonellis said.
A panel of chefs, food writers and state officials evaluated each tomato based on the exterior color, flavor, shape, firmness and slicing and ranked the top five for four categories: slicing, cherry, heirloom and heaviest.
For Raymond, a good tomato is “all in the taste.”
“Some people like them really juicy, other people like them firm if they’re going to be a sandwich tomato or a salad tomato,” he said.
“It’s a true taste of summer when the tomatoes start to come out,” Antonellis said.
According to Antonellis, in the Connecticut River Valley, there’s something in the soil for award-winning tomatoes. Past flooding moves the silt with “all the good bacteria from the bottom of the river” back onto the soil bed, leading many farmers like Antonellis to grow produce without irrigating the land, she said.
“Tomatoes can be tricky,” Raymond added. “There’s so many different things that can happen to them that people don’t have a clue about.”
At The Raymond Farm, Raymond uses fungicides and organic insecticides to keep about 18 types of tomato diseases in check. Besides the blights, he has caught hungry caterpillars gobbling an entire tomato plant over only two days.
To grow a trophy tomato, Antonellis said farmers and gardeners must also use fertilizer, keep an eye on the weeds and watch out for moisture on the “shoulders” of the tomatoes.
“If you’re having a really wet year, you’re going to have a bad tomato year for the most part because you’re continuously getting water on your tomatoes,” Antonellis said, adding that “rain check” on tomatoes can lead to cracks, lines and other unwanted quirks.
“They don’t look as perfectly pretty, and most people want the perfectly pretty tomatoes,” she said. “They don’t want misfits.”
Antonellis, on the other hand, likes the misfits. She enjoys growing tomatoes for the plant’s variety. Farmers and gardeners can choose between roughly 10,000 types of tomatoes, including more than 3,000 kinds of heirloom tomatoes alone, according to FoodPrint.
Antonellis Farm grows tomatoes of all kinds, like the terracotta tomatoes Antonellis is worried may not sell as well, due to the brown tint that earned the fruit its name.
“There’s always something new you can try every year,” Antonellis said.
Between the farm’s several types of tomatoes, the fruit is a best-seller at the farmstand. According to Antonellis, in the summer, customers often buy nearly 200 pounds of tomatoes in one day.
Rossi-Raymond’s relationship with tomatoes had a rocky start.
“I would have never touched a tomato growing up,” she said. But after growing and harvesting the fruit for the last 25 years, she now eats them every day.
Rossi-Raymond described tending to the plants as her “zen time.” With other careers behind them, she said she and her husband are living out their “retirement dream.”
“It’s so good for the soul to live like this,” she said.
Like Rossi-Raymond and Raymond, Antonellis grew up in a farming family. At 12 years old, she sold corn under the yellow umbrella — the beginnings of Ciesluk Farm Stand.
For as long as she can remember, she has loved the divisive fruit.
“I’m a tomato girl,” Antonellis said, smiling. “Me and my grandfather, we’d always go up to the house after the end of the day and slice one up, salt one up — either that or you can just eat one like an apple… shaker in one hand, tomato in the other.”
