The Latest Dirt - March 2024

The Tomato Sale That Grew

By Liz Rottger

When did UC Master Gardeners of Contra Costa hold its first tomato sale? That depends on how you define “first.” In 2010, CoCoMGs took over a small, neglected vegetable garden next to the Contra Costa Times building on Shadelands in Walnut Creek. Joan Morris, the Times nature columnist, facilitated this takeover. Janet Miller and Helen Erickson stepped forward to lead this new project, and for the next two years, they held small plant sales at what was now christened by Joan as “Our Garden.” Those sales would be CoCoMGs “first” plant sales.

But in December 2011, Janet and Liz Rottger got together for the first time to plan a more extensive, community-wide tomato sale. With the help of Sharon Gibson, who was then taking over publicity for CoCoMGs, they called it the “First Annual Great Tomato Plant Sale—Heirlooms of the World.” The “First Annual” and “Great” were giant leaps of faith in the sale’s future.

A small team, including Janet and Liz, Helen Erickson, Lee Bressette, and Dianne Martinelli, was formed to organize the tomato sale. Sharon designed a beautiful poster and flyer for the Great Tomato Plant Sale with a ‘sexy’ tomato—the same design we still use today. Janet selected 34 heirloom tomato varieties—21 of which remain in our inventory—to propagate. The original plan was to distribute seeds of each tomato variety to a Master Gardener to propagate individually.

There was no shortage of volunteers. From the outset, there was tremendous enthusiasm among UC Master Gardeners for the sale. But Janet had the fortunate insight to see that if we wanted to maintain quality control, we needed to centralize propagation, and Janet volunteered her own home for that purpose. She had a large garden and a small greenhouse with electricity for warm pads. At Janet’s home, we organized the first sizeable seeding work parties, then even larger potting-up parties, labeling each plant carefully with hand-written labels; we constructed our first hoop houses for the plants as they grew. What could possibly go wrong?

Early one Sunday in late February 2012, Liz got a call from Janet, reporting that there had been a 29-degree frost in Walnut Creek the previous night. Quite a few tender plants were lost. Shocked, Liz said, “Oh, No! What do we do now?” “Don’t worry,” Janet, the perennial optimist, answered. We’ll re-seed.” Besides, she noted that over 2000 tomato seedlings were still in the flats in her greenhouse.

We kept moving forward. The Help Desk created a variety of educational handouts to give our customers so they would be successful tomato growers: growing tips, conserving water, tomato diseases and pests, and, for added entertainment, tomato recipes. We scheduled the First Annual Great Tomato Plant Sale for three days in early April of 2012 as part of an opening celebration of the new location of CoCoMG’s Our Garden. Unfortunately, the new Our Garden wasn’t quite ready for a tomato sale in April, and we had to move the sale back to the original garden site at The Times building. We didn’t have much of a publicity plan: we sent some information to local papers; Joan Morris wrote a column about the sale, and we posted flyers all around the county: no social media and no public newsletter. We had no cash registers. Emma Connery and Harriett Burt would write individual receipts for customers on dime–store cash receipt books. But we had 3000 beautiful heirloom tomato plants, each costing only $2.

We were nervous that we might not sell all these plants in one day, so we scheduled a three-day sale. We thought it would take three days to sell 3000 tomato plants. We sold out by noon on the first day! We had to post the following sign: “SOLD OUT! Due to unprecedented, unexpected, and overwhelming demand, the First Annual Tomato Plant Sale sold out in its first few hours.” It was definitely redundant, but we were stunned. We even asked a few brave UC Master Gardeners to perform the thankless task of apologizing over the next two days to the disappointed, and sometimes very upset, customers who came to the sale. But, no doubt, we had a fan club!

In 2024, UC Master Gardeners of Contra Costa will host its 12th Annual Great Tomato Plant Sale. We skipped the 2020 GTPS when we donated our plants to local organizations because of COVID-19. We will return this year to all three regions of Contra Costa County—east, central and west. We will offer over 37,000 plants, including 73 varieties of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes and a considerable array of peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers, herbs, squash, pumpkins and zucchinis. Approximately 2500 persons will visit the three sales and buy, on average, 10 plants. We have indeed created an annual “Great Tomato Plant Sale!”