Features
Welcoming the Handsome Stranger
Green Tomato Heaven
by Euan Bear
Once upon a time in late summer in St. Louis, little Nattie and her mum would “go walkabout” in their small city garden hunting the last green tomatoes. Nattie’s mum, Maragaret, would chop them up with onions and wonderful spices to make the most delicious chutney in the world. And then they’d go walkabout to all their neighbors and give the jars away. The recipe came to America from Australia with Margaret. And even though Nattie’s aunt (Margaret’s brother’s wife Carol) made a very similar recipe back in Australia, Margaret always whispered to Nattie, “Mine’s much better than Carol’s.”
That ritual – and its image of dueling ladles – gave birth to Huntington’s Outback Kitchens and its sole product: green tomato chutney. The label has morphed the dueling ladles image into a feisty boxing kangaroo with green tomatoes for gloves, but Nat Grant promises that what’s inside is her mother’s own recipe – the best chutney you’ve ever tasted, and possibly the best use ever invented for Vermont’s never-going-to-ripen tomatoes.
You can’t hear any Aussie in Nat’s speech, although she does call her crop “ta-MAH-toes.” But she’s gotten an outback-style “school of hard knocks” education in founding a specialty food products business and growing its main ingredient over the past 4 years.
We’re looking out her high kitchen window at the bare bones of the greenhouse and the now fallow raised bed garden in the field below. The greenhouse floor is bright with winter rye that will be tilled in.
Enter the uh-oh school of experience: “This is the first year I’ve tried a cover crop, and now I’ve found out that winter rye is particularly hardy and likes to come back,” says Nat. The first year she grew tomatoes (ta-MAH-tos) in the roadside greenhouse, one neighbor confided to another, “That girl’s growing pot in there, you know.”
The greenhouse is 50 feet long by 14 feet wide. The 20 raised beds in the fenced, open-air garden average 3 by 12 feet, but only five of them will be planted in tomatoes this year. A second greenhouse, like the first, of galvanized steel ribs with heavy UV-stabilized plastic sheeting is in the plans for this year as well. Nat doesn’t use mechanical heating or ventilation. When it’s hot, she rolls up the sides by hand.
Another chalk-it-up-to-experience story: “Those pesky cherry tomatoes. We just couldn’t eat enough of them, nobody could. You can’t dry them, really, so some eventually ended up in the beds, in the soil. The next year I got only one batch from that bed because of disease.” You get nightshade-family (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and tobacco) diseases when plant material in that group overwinters in the soil, diseases like early and late blights and tobacco mosaic virus.
Water is always a concern. She looks up towards the eaves of the roof, imagining the system she’ll build to efficiently catch rainfall and funnel it to the 4-nipple soaker hose arrangement she uses now. The barrels that in the later spring catch rainfall are now in use by a neighbor catching maple sap.
Nat gets up to bring a chutney three-pack to the table. Excelsior cushions the jars in a miniature crate, and “Outback Kitchens, Huntington, Vermont” is burned into one of the wood slats by hand. “I build these crates, you know,” Nat declares, “I burn the name in myself. It’s a nice way to bring my wood shop into the business.”
She started in this business “as a carpenter-woodworker, knowing nothing about specialty food production,” she says. And that’s where experience has taught her so much. “The first year, I made a deal with two other people to grow tomatoes for me, and it was an absolute flop. I built my first greenhouse out of pvc pipe, which wasn’t strong enough to trellis the tomatoes to. So we ended up with an 11 by 50 by 4 foot-wide mass of albino tomatoes. You literally had to go swimming in the plants to find any produce. It was a learning experience.”
Even with the greenhouse and the raised beds, Nat can’t grow enough tomatoes to meet her production needs. She’s contracted with other growers to “clean up” the green tomatoes from their greenhouses at the end of the season. And she’s gotten tomatoes from Eric & Julie’s Farm in Bristol, Riverberry Farm in Fairfax, and in some years, from David Miskel to fill out some batches.
The tomatoes are organically grown, whether they’re from Nat’s garden or one of the others. She “didn’t bother” going through the process to actually have her chutney certified as an organic food because the process at the time was in flux, she says, long and complicated. By the time you read this, the seeds will have been started under grow lights in front of the south facing picture window. Seeds come from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, among others. She plants varieties that yield large, slow-ripening, low-water-content fruit. “I plant Buffaloes in the greenhouse, an indeterminate,” meaning the plants keep on blossoming and bearing fruit throughout the harvest season. The outdoor garden gets the determinate varieties: Early Girl, Big Boy. “I tried Valley Girls last year – they were a flop.”
Nat says she doesn’t get “real technical. I don’t put heating pads under the trays or anything. I pray a lot.” She laughs.
The process of turning 500 pounds of tomatoes and onions and spices into about 450 jars of chutney (one batch; Nat made seven batches last year) happens at the Vermont Food Venture Center, where specialty foods entrepreneurs can rent space in a new production facility that is built for large-batch cooking and mechanized labeling, virtually sterile and inspected often. “I do the work – in hairnet and whites,” along with her partner Aurora “the corer” and occasional hired help. She does her own distribution, including deliveries to corner stores, the Cabot Annex on Route 100 between Waterbury and Stowe, about 25 outlets in all. Her newest is Pumpkin’s Organic Market in New York City. She does three farmer’s markets during the season: Richmond, Burlington, and Stowe. And, of course, there’s mail order, likely to increase when she gets her website up and running.
“I’m the black sheep of the specialty food business,” Nat declares. “Every other company is trying to do five new products each year. They produce an average of five to 20 items. They come out with a new product or a variation on their basic product, ‘hot ’n spicey’ or cajun style. I have just one. And I’m keeping it that way. I have no dreams of making multi-millions or building up a company so I can sell it. I won’t sell it.” It’s the personal touch that attracts many customers she says. They see her at a farmer’s market and are impressed that she’s the one who actually made the chutney, not some corporation from far away.
Asked whether her being a lesbian has any connection to her garden or her business, Nat says, “I don’t know. Just that it takes all kinds. And we’re everywhere. The difference it has made is in the incredible support the lesbian and gay community have given me – encouragement, excitement, visits at Farmer’s Markets, buying the product, sharing their tips on how they use it, telling their friends about it.
“I love working with the earth, getting dirt on my hands. I just happen to be a lesbian out there growing green tomatoes.”