Enjoy home-grown tomatoes every day of the summer

Shelley Barlow is totally into tomatoes.

During summer, she never goes a day without dining on several.

"I eat tomatoes three meals a day, plus snacks when they are in season," she says. "Lots and lots of tomato sandwiches and BLTs, of course."

Luckily, her craving for fresh tomatoes is easily satisfied in a two-acre vegetable garden at her 800-acre Cotton Plains Farm in Suffolk, Va. There, she grows more than 200 tomato plants, many of them heirloom varieties.

Since 2005, Shelley has grown crops as a Community Supported Agriculture business. Customers sign a contract, paying $270-$360 for 12 small or large weekly baskets of fresh vegetables.

"We decided not to grow peanuts anymore and were looking for another enterprise to add to the farming operations," says Shelley, 49.

"The tomatoes just have always been my favorite, as long as I can remember. My mom says it's because of all the tomatoes she ate the summer she was pregnant with me."

She and husband, Joe, run the farm, which grows acres and acres of cotton and corn. A 1982 agriculture graduate of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Shelley has raised hogs, worked in a veterinarian clinic, sold pig feed and been an agricultural pharmaceutical representative.

She's farmed full time since 1997, and has the tanned arms and face to go with it.

In the vegetable garden close to the house, Shelley's single row of tomatoes measures several hundred feet. Galvanized metal livestock pens are recycled into tomato stakes. Lined in an inverted V formation, they are just the thing to keep the tomato plants and fruits from hitting the ground.

"I was staking and stringing the tomatoes, but these pens are perfect," says Shelley. "When you farm, you get creative and reuse everything you can."

Heirloom tomatoes she grows include Rutgers, Green and Red Zebra, Cherokee Purple, Early Girl, Rose, Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine, Nyagous, White Wonder and Lillian's Yellow Heirloom. An heirloom tomato is open pollinated by insects, bird, wind or other natural mechanisms, or a variety passed down from generation to generation. Seeds from open-pollinated varieties produce plants and fruit that are identical to the parent.

When Shelley heads into the garden for a tomato for her own summer meals, she's most likely to pick Brandywine.