Last month, Mendo Co-Founders Mario and Ellen celebrated the ten year anniversary of our relationship with Scarborough Farms by driving out to visit the farmers in their fields in Oxnard, CA. We always feature their baby greens in some of our most popular salads, but every year we start planning months in advance to get our hands on their heirloom tomatoes that have been slowly growing and ripening for months under the hot sun and cool breeze, just waiting to be harvested, sliced thick, and nestled into our Summer Heirloom BLT.
These juicy, rainbow-colored tomatoes are heirlooms in more ways than one. Scarborough Farms is run by a mother and son named Ann and Jeff Stein, who grow them from original seed stock to ensure a saturated, sun-kissed flavor worthy of passing from one generation to the next. The tomatoes’ journey begins on January 1st each year, when the peak of summer is still half a year away. They carefully plant the heirloom seeds in trays and place the trays in the nursery to germinate. They wait until the first or second week of March (the day after the last frost) to transplant the sprouts into the fields, where they will grow tall, fill out with leaves, and start to flower. At the beginning of summer, these flowers magically become tomatoes in every shape and size imaginable.
