The Secret of Tomatoes
“Grandpa? What makes Hooper tomatoes so much better than all the other tomatoes?” I would often ask this of my Grandfather Don Read as he would drop off what seemed like endless buckets of Tomatoes from his Garden each year. The Garden (yes in capital letters) looked like a farm to me even though it was nowhere near that size. And it produced tomatoes that even to this day I remember fondly as the best tasting I have ever partaken of. He would often respond with explanations, like the fact that they were watered once a week, or that in Hooper there was a lot against growing them and so the ones that made it was the sweetest, or sometimes he would just say that the soil was a high alkaline soil. Some of these explanations have probably less to do with science and more to do with legend. “There must be something in the water” is a comment I have heard from time to time standing in line at one of the many stands that pop up around Hooper Utah during the harvesting