Jefferson Farm will be rich with red, orange and green as the University of Missouri’s annual Tomato Festival gears up. From 4 to 7 p.m. Thursday, festival-goers will be in a fresh tomato haven.
The festival started off as a small idea among three colleagues in 2005. They recalled Mizzou having a tomato breeding program and mini festival in the 1960s and wanted to bring that back, with the aim of helping people understand different types of tomatoes.
Now, 21 years later, Tim Reinbott, who was one of the original organizers of the festival and is now the director of field operations, is getting ready to retire. For his final tomato festival, he wants to “go big or go home.”
This year’s festival, at 4800 E. New Haven Road, will have as many as 240 varieties of tomatoes, up from the 180 they had last year. From cherry tomatoes the size of buttons to large beef steak tomatoes, the festival will even show off an experimental breed flown in from the University of Florida. There will also be a range of sauces, some of the world’s hottest peppers and other prepared food items.
Preparation for the festival starts in January, when a team of master gardeners and Mizzou students start ordering seeds. During the first week of April, they plant more than 2,000 plants in the greenhouse, then later move them outside where students take care of them over the summer. In a timely manner, the tomatoes are ready to be picked freshly the day before the festival.
Reinbott said it could not be done without the master gardeners.
“They come out and we’ve got it all set up and ready to go,” Reinbott said. “We knock that out in two hours. It’s amazing how fast they do it.”
Along with tasting several varieties of tomatoes, festival-goers can also watch cooking and gardening demonstrations, purchase items at the plant sale and listen to education talks about tomato prediction, diseases and insects, among others.
“I love it when people come back and tell me, ‘Hey, I tasted this certain tomato at the tomato fest, and now I’m planting it in my own garden,’” Reinbott said. “That’s really rewarding.”
Admission to the festival is free. Children may be particularly entertained in the Kids Corner with a milk tasting, featuring seven flavors of milk, a wagon full of corn to play in, a butterfly house and a scavenger hunt.
“There’s something for everybody,” Reinbott, a tomato lover himself, said. “We hope that the tomatoes and peppers taste wonderful.”
