Tomato Tasting at Ghost Island Farm Is a Joyous Journey

My adulthood began when I started to like tomatoes.

It was the most baffling development of my selfhood. Growing up I would only eat processed or cooked tomatoes — salsa was fine, pasta sauce, ketchup — but never raw. The tomatoes pushed to the side of my salad plate were always a sharp blow to the juvenile maturity I was so proud of. I would grit my teeth and swallow when my mom offered up her home-grown cherry tomatoes so that I didn’t hurt her feelings.

The change began slowly, surprising me sometime in college with a craving for a slice on a sandwich or colorful cherry tomato in a salad. By the time I got to farming I was eating cherry tomatoes by the handful and biting into ripe heirlooms like apples, wondering how I ever could have despised this fruit. This was a milestone in my burgeoning adulthood.

There was something sad about it, though, this picky eating tendency left behind, along with my childhood. It wasn’t something I chose, forcing myself to endure tomato exposure therapy. It just happened. Something clicked in my body, changed in my taste buds and suddenly, I liked tomatoes.

My tomato-eating adventures peaked in early September, when I went to a tomato tasting at Ghost Island Farm. Some people know this farm, and its owner Rusty Gordon, for the extravagant Halloween displays and oddities tucked into the greenhouses. Others know the farm for its accessible CSA, and others, for its tomatoes.

Rusty and his longtime partner, Sarah Crittenden, used to grow over 200 varieties of tomatoes in a year. Now, they’ve pared it down to about 100. It’s fascinating to see all the different kinds, Rusty told me, the new varieties every year, the different colors. It also brings traffic and money to the farm, which has acquired a reputation for its smorgasbord of tomatoes at the front of their farmstand.

“It just makes sense to grow a lot because we can sell a lot,” he said. “People are really impressed by it.”

And impressed I was — even a little intimidated — by the 26 different varieties laid out on a table for us to try in a farmworker event organized by the Agricultural Society. There were five different kinds of cherries, three Romas, eight yellows, nine reds and a single green tomato, completely and freakishly ripe. Behind the tasting table were Rusty’s clown mannequins, poised for his clown party the next day.

We passed around the cherries, watching Rusty as he pulled out his pocket knife and sliced through a purple cherry tomato to show us the beautiful violet color inside. We ate green zebra cherries and their pear-shaped cousins, “mint julep.” We pondered the difference between sun gold and sun sugar.

Rusty gets his seeds from here and there, and then saves them for the next season. These are all open-pollinated varieties, meaning non-GMO, and many of them heirloom. Rusty takes the seeds from an overripe, rotting and fermenting tomato, dries them out on a paper plate, slips them into labeled seed packets, and stores them in empty trash cans upstairs until the spring.

Most of the time, the plants produce tomatoes that look like their ancestors. But sometimes, something strange will happen. Certain tomato varieties have different genetic tendencies, Rusty explained, and occasionally will give him a new, surprise variety to work with.

That’s how he got “black ghost,” a black-ish red heirloom tomato.

When the “new big dwarf” tomato plants were coming up, there was one that looked completely different, even though it came from the same seeds, said Rusty. To his knowledge, this tomato is completely unique to his farm. He named it and saved the seeds for next year, and “black ghost” became a staple of Ghost Island Farm.

Other varieties I enjoyed: “Garden peach,” for its peach-like appearance and fuzzy-ish exterior, “harvest moon,” a yellow tomato with a glow of red on the inside, and “Jersey devil,” a rich, creamy Roma tomato. “Lemon boy” was my favorite, a yellow tomato with a rich, mellow, and almost thyme-like flavor.

It’s amazing how much shape and color play into this making of favorites. Peculiarity is delicious, and silly names like “pork chop” and “Bulgarian bulls heart,” two varieties of tomato, make food more interesting. Why grow so many varieties was the question on my mind, until I met them. It’s fun, and playful and interesting — does there need to be any other reason?

This is something I have learned as I shape and modify my idea of adulthood at 23 years old (which, I am well aware, many people still consider to be very young). It is not just having a job, paying my rent, making doctor’s appointments on my own and wearing my retainer of my own volition. It is not growing out of childish things like playing on the swings, being obsessed with cartoons, and refusing to eat raw tomatoes. It’s a repurposing of all of these things: an intentional nurturing of fun, play, weirdness and spontaneity, built into and around the things we do to make a living.

This struck me walking down “sunflower lane” at the edge of Rusty’s four acres and when we peeked in the greenhouse to see his pet fish in a big tub of water and the pond plants next to it for the bull frogs.

“It’s just for fun,” said Rusty. “If you just take your time, be patient with them, get them to eat out of your hand, they recognize your voice.”

As we ate 26 types of tomatoes under the gaze of a dozen clowns, I considered once again my maturation into a fully-grown, tomato-loving adult. Here was the pinnacle of this development: appreciating this pretty color, giggling over that silly name, trying another slice and another despite the impending acidic consequences. Making room for wonder, even a little disgust (there were varieties I did not like so much). Allowing my adulthood to begin again, and again and again.

This article appears in September 11, 2026.