Caro Rich tomatoes provide abundance of vitamin A

Gardeners, like gardens, have to prepare for winter. You want ample vitamin A for great vision and healthy eyes, to strengthen the immune system, even supple skin and winter-ready healthy mucous membranes. Our bodies use beta carotene to produce vitamin A. Beta carotene is the pigment that gives color to vegetables such as red peppers, broccoli, sweet potatoes, yellow squash, and leafy greens and carrots. In fact, the name beta carotene was chosen from the Latin name for carrot.

While taking large doses of vitamin A can be unhealthy and even toxic, the great thing about beta carotene is that our bodies only convert as much vitamin A from beta carotene as we need.

Luckily, vegetables from your garden are rich in beta carotene. Unfortunately, the most popular garden vegetable, the tomato, isn’t one of those vegetables, and is not unusually high in beta carotene, like, say, carrots.

Until E.C. Tigchelaar and M.L. Tomes at Purdue University developed a stunning orange tomato with up to 10 times the beta carotene than the average tomatoes. They named it Caro Rich (Solanum lycopersicum ‘Caro Rich’).

The Caro Rich tomato plant is regular leafed and indeterminate, which means it keeps growing all season long. unlike determinate tomatoes that produce all of their fruit at once and stop growing.

These are large beefsteak golden globes weighing in at 10 to 12 ounces each. The plants tend to be drought tolerant.

Unfortunately, Caro Rich tomato plants are almost never found as transplants, and even Caro Rich seeds can be hard to find at garden centers or nurseries.

If seeds are not on local seed racks then get them through mail-order companies such as Totally Tomatoes (334 W. Stroud St., Randolph, WI 53956 or 800-345-5977) or Sand Hill Preservation (www.sandhillpreservation.com).

Start your Caro Rich tomato plants indoors about six to eight weeks before the average last frost. Sow the seeds one-quarter inch deep, an inch apart in flats of sterile seed starter or seed starting soil mix. Place the flats where they will get as much sun as possible in a sunny area such as a south-facing window. It helps to provide additional lighting with overhead grow lights. If the tomato seedlings don’t get enough light, they will become weak and leggy. In a week or two your seeds will germinate.

After the seedlings are up, try to keep the temperature under 70 degrees F. Water frequently, but do not drown them. Once a week, fertilize the seedlings with liquid organic fertilizers such as fish emulsion or compost tea.

If you have to thin out any seedlings because of overcrowding or sickliness use scissors to cut them rather than pulling them up, which could uproot nearby seedlings.

Once the second set of leaves, which are the first true leaves, sprout it is time to transplant them to individual pots. You can bury the stems deeper than they were in the flat.

A few days after transplanting, cut back on the water and give them more sun. After the weather warms up, harden off the plants by putting them in a sheltered spot outside or even on a porch. This lets the tomato plants develop some resistance to harsh sun and wind before you transplant them to the garden.

Like all tomatoes put Caro Rich tomato plants where they can get full sun. Tomatoes grow the best when the garden soil is neutral or close to neutral which is a pH of 7.

Plan now to grow Caro Rich tomatoes, and you can have a beta carotene-rich harvest next year, even if you hate broccoli.