Portland Magazine
October 25, 2019
Meet the farmer who grows tomatoes for UP
by Tara Austen Weaver
AT FIRST GLANCE, the Oregon Star tomatoes that Charlie Harris grows on his farm in Gaston, OR, might not impress you. They have none of the knobs and bulges of what we’ve come to think of as “heirloom” tomatoes. You might not give them a second glance—unless you saw how people line up for his stand at the farmers market, filling their bags with the weighty, torpedo-shaped red fruit all summer long.
“We have quite a following,” Harris admits, sitting in the shade at his Flamingo Ridge Organic Farm. Behind him a series of domed greenhouses cascade down the hillside, each of them containing a low jungle of sticky vines and ruddy fruit. “I’ve met chefs from Italy who say they’re some of the best tomatoes they’ve worked with and tasted in their life.”
General manager Kirk Mustain, who purchases Harris’s tomatoes for the University dining program, agrees. “They’re incredible,” he says, “so meaty and delicious.” As part of the University’s commitment to sourcing local foods, carried out through their partnership with Bon Appétit Management Company, Mustain has been buying tomatoes from Flamingo Ridge for more than 15 years. “You just don’t see store-bought tomatoes like that,” he says. “We look forward to them every year.”
When the tomatoes are available, they’re treated like an entrée. “We like to do a tomato stand,” Mustain explains. “We slice and serve them with sea salt, olive oil, fresh herbs, and balsamic vinegar. They’re the star of the plate. We try to show our students what awesome produce is really like.”
The Oregon Star is not a commonly grown tomato— you may never have heard of it. To Harris’s knowledge, he is the only one growing them commercially. The tomato was released to the public in 1993, one of many developed by famed plant breeder Dr. James R. Baggett for the agriculture program at Oregon State.
Oregon Star is a cross between Roma and Santiam. It’s a paste-style tomato that resembles its parent Roma but is larger and rounder and ripens early in the season. At Flamingo Ridge, they aim to have their first tomatoes ready mid-June.
What makes Oregon Star so special?
“They’re a low-acid tomato with a lot of flavor,” says Deva Harris, Charlie’s wife. “The skins are thin, so you don’t have to peel them if you want to can them or make sauce. They’re meaty, with less moisture— you don’t have to cook them down.”
The afternoon I visited the farm, Deva had spent the day canning tomatoes in the farmhouse kitchen with a group of friends. She puts up 300 quarts of the densely fleshed fruit each summer. “The Oregon Star has been very good to us,” she says.
Why don’t other people grow the Oregon Star? According to Charlie Harris, it’s hard to track down the seed.
“They’re seedless tomatoes,” he explains, and they were bred that way.
Most Oregon Star tomatoes have no seeds at all—but at the very end of the season, in order to reproduce, each plant ripens a few fruits with seed. Harris harvests the seed from these late-season tomatoes, a process that involves allowing the seeds to soak and ferment a bit, which dissolves the jellied pouch that protects each seed and prevents germination. These seeds he dries to save for next year’s plants. It’s a laborious process that many farmers wouldn’t bother with, but it’s how he’s managed to grow the cultivar for so many years.
Tomatoes are not the only thing that Harris grows. There’s a crop of Romaine lettuce in the early spring, before the greenhouses fill up, some summer squash, melons, eggplants, and beans, but the vast bulk of his output comes from 13,000 Oregon Star plants he starts each January. In addition to supplying all of Bon Appétit’s local accounts, he sells to 52 restaurants and several markets. He services an area from Wilsonville to Camas, WA, making all the deliveries himself. He leaves the farm at 3 am with 1.5 tons of produce in his truck, the vast majority of it Oregon Star tomatoes—some of which are destined for the salads, pizza, and pasta special at the Pilot House and Bauccio Commons.
Harris tells a story of a woman from New Jersey who showed up at a farmers market, swearing that no tomato could match the flavor of the fruit found in her home state, but she bought a few of his anyway. “She came back the next week and said ours were the best tomatoes she’d ever had!” he laughs.
Oregon Stars, indeed.
TARA AUSTEN WEAVER is the author, most recently, of Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest.
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