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Are Your Tomatoes ‘Epic’? If Not, Here’s What You Should Be Doing
Tomato experts Craig LeHoullier and Joe Lamp’l have some advice for you.
By Margaret Roach
Feb. 16, 2022

“We are the luckiest tomato growers in all of history,” proclaimed Craig LeHoullier as he thumbed with dramatic effect through the Seed Savers Exchange yearbook, a hefty index of nearly 12,000 heirloom varieties of the beloved Solanum lycopersicum.

Choosing among such a staggering selection of tomatoes, plus hundreds of modern hybrids not included in that print version of the yearbook, is the first step toward your best-ever harvest — or what Dr. LeHoullier, a retired chemist who has grown perhaps 3,000 varieties, calls “epic tomatoes.”
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“Epic Tomatoes: How to Select and Grow the Best Varieties of All Time” is Dr. LeHoullier’s 2014 book, now in its seventh printing, with about 80,000 copies in print. And Growing Epic Tomatoes is the name of an online course that he teaches with his friend Joe Lamp’l, the host for 12 years of the Emmy Award-winning public television program “Growing a Greener World.”
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What makes Mr. Lamp’l — and Dr. LeHoullier, as well — smile even more: summer’s first ripe tomato.