Brad Gates makes tomatoes like a master craftsman. Red with bleeding yellow stripes and vertical green bands that look like metallic paint. Tomatoes of indigo blue, tomatoes pretty in pink and yellow tomatoes splotched with green. All are infused with a splurge of flavor.
When supermarkets were still featuring big, uniformly round, red tomatoes that looked perfect but lacked personality, Gates was falling in love with the more homely fruit of the field — tomatoes that didn't look like tomatoes, "weird, non-red tomatoes" as he calls them, with odd shapes and creases.
And now his Wild Boar Farms tomatoes, varieties he developed himself over many years of selection and experimentation, are some of the best "must have" tomatoes around. Tomato lovers are grabbing them up in seeds and starts, varieties with names as strange as they look, like Large Barred Boar and Solar Flare.
Sebastopol's Larry Wagner won Best of Show at the 2011 Kendall-Jackson Heirloom Tomato Fest with Gates' richly sweet Pink Berkeley Tie Dye, a cross with Cherokee Purple that is earlier than Early Girl. Last year Wagner took the heaviest tomato prize with Gates' Pineapple Pig, a 1 pound 13 ounce bruiser. Other Wild Boar varieties took other honors.
"I'm the most famous poor guy I know," declares the man whose goal is to create "the most amazing varieties there are" that make people want to come "crawling back" for more.
Gates grows 20,000 starts in greenhouses in Calistoga and organically farms a fertile spring-fed acre and a half in St. Helena. He is one of only several small, leading independent hybridizers in Northern California — including Fred Hempel of Sunol and Gary Ibsen of Carmel — who are creating new "heirloom" varieties the old-fashioned way. Their fruit is visually intriguing, flavorful and open-pollinated, meaning you can save the seed with assurance that they will produce the same tomato.
They also are well-adapted to the Bay Area climate, which is particularly important in a drought year when there's no water to waste on mistakes or low-producers.
"It's wonderful to have a tomato breeder in your own neighborhood, because you know they're going to do well here," said Elaine Walter, who oversees the selection and growing of tomato starts for the Harvest for the Hungry garden's plant sale April 26 in Santa Rosa.
Wild Boar tomatoes, including the popular new blue tomatoes like Indigo Apple, Blue Beauty and Blue Berries, rich in healthy anthocyanins, are expected to go fast at the sale.
Last year Walter grew Wild Boar's Pork Chop, a true yellow with green stripes that ripen to gold.
"It was fantastic," she praised. "It's a bright yellow and very tasty, with low acid. It's just an amazing tomato. There's almost a glow to it, it's so pretty."
After 16 years of growing and developing new varieties, the Napa native is hitting his stride.
In addition to the Harvest for the Hungry garden sale, his tomato starts are carried at Harmony Farm Supply in Sebastopol and the Petaluma Seed Bank, and will be featured at Tomatomania, a traveling show that stops at Cornerstone Sonoma April 26 and 27 and Trione Vineyards and Winery in Geyserville May 3.
Baker Creek Seeds devotes four pages to Wild Boar varieties in its 2014 catalog, and Gates grows all of the peppers and eggplants in the catalog that are used on display at the annual National Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa in September.
Gates calls the blues "the most exciting thing going on in the tomato world." In addition to being nutritious and attractive, they hang longer on the vine, a boon to farmers and gardeners who can't pick or eat their crop fast enough.
Self-taught, he got the tomato bug 20years ago helping a friend work the farmer's market and watching customers gush over the old heirloom varieties.
While he sells some finished tomatoes at farmer's markets and Whole Foods stores, his main focus is developing new varieties — some 30 to 40 so far — and selling starts and seed.
It's an arduous process that demands keen observation for selecting out the best, crossing and waiting sometimes up to seven years to grow them out, an experience he likens to an anxious kid watching a present under the Christmas tree but unable to open it. He constantly patrols the rows, tasting and tossing anything that doesn't make him happy.
"It's not the most simple thing, but in a lot of ways it's been the most rewarding thing I could do," he said. "Everyone wants to leave a legacy. After I'm gone, the tomatoes will be here. They'll be staples for a long time."
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.
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