Meet Richard Price—Electrotechnologist, Purveyor of Rare Flowers, Famous For His Heirloom Tomatos

Richard Price could be known for many things. Among other things, he’s a talented singer; an accomplished portrait photographer; a home brewer of beers, ciders, and wines; an experienced electrotechnologist in genetics; a green thumb; a do-it-yourselfer and traditionalist. In fact, it’s mostly by a strange turn of plant evolution that he’s come to be known, informally, as “the tomato man.”

Richard Price

Price grows a wide variety of heirloom plants—peppers, beans, and ornamentals, to name a few—and saves their seeds. But he grows and sells far more varieties of tomato—40 or more—than anything else. That’s due in great part, he says, to the fact that “tomatoes are among the easiest to save seeds from.”

You see, unlike most other plants, each flower on a tomato plant is perfect, meaning it has both a female pistil and male stamens. “They don’t cross in the garden,” Price says. “By the time the flower opens, it’s already self-pollinated.” They remain, in other words, genetically pure. The variety of tomato you harvest is almost always the same variety you planted months previous.

Price sees the work of growing heirloom tomatoes as a form of activism. “It’s a way of not going back to the corporation every year,” Price says, “a way of doing it for yourself, which we’re kind of forgetting how to do.”

He’s concerned that humanity’s increasing reliance on corporate food sources is a dangerous trend, particularly in countries where the government limits what varieties of plants can be commercially cultivated. The European Union, for instance, publishes a list of seed varieties that can be grown commercially within its borders. “In theory, or what they would tell you, is this is done to guarantee the quality of the seed supply and all the rest of it,” Price says. “But the input is all from big corporations.”

If somebody wants to maintain a different variety of seeds and offer them for sale, they have to pay a fee to register that variety and justify growing it, in terms of its “desirable” characteristics. All of this is leading to genetic erosion within plant species. Heirlooms are cultivated to maintain genetic diversity.

The word heirloom, as applied to plants, generally refers to an open-pollinated (not purposely bred) variety that has been passed down through a family. Some people qualify it further by saying that a variety has to have been around more than 50 years before it’s given heirloom designation.

Price is a member of Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a nonprofit network of gardeners and farmers whose members swap heirloom plant varieties, ensuring their survival. Many of the plant varieties—which numbered nearly 13,000 in 2007—have been passed on within families, as evidenced by the dozens of tomatoes, beans, melons, and broccolis in the 2007 SSE catalogue named “Granny Carville’s Yellow Roma,” or “Grandma Glady’s Yellow Belgian,” or simply “Grandpa Charlie.”

The catalogue is nearly 500 pages long, and lists all kinds of genetically unique fruits, vegetables, and grains that are available to members courtesy of other members. Price is listed under the code “NY PR R2.” It shows that he’s from Buffalo, and that in 2007 he offered two bean varieties, one lettuce, one pepper, and four tomatoes. If this isn’t evidence that tomatoes are the easiest to save, then all one has to do is flip through the 170-page section of the catalogue that lists tomatoes.

This year, Price is growing a dozen or so varieties of tomato, a fact that reinforces his old refrain: “Labeling is everything. You’ve got to label ’em when you plant ’em, label ’em out in the garden, and label them when you save the seeds.” The tomatoes have colorful names, such as Purple Cherokee, Kentucky Moonshine, and Stupice. Many of them have a story behind them, too. Druzba, for example, a Bulgarian variety whose name means “friend” in Bulgarian. “I suspect,” says Richard, “that somebody got it at a market in Bulgaria and asked, ‘So what’s the name of this variety?’ The vendor must’ve said, ‘Call it friendship…take it, take it.’”

Another one is called Mortgage Lifter, and it has a legend. Price pauses to think about it. “A guy down in…I think it was Virginia…created this variety by growing a bunch of different varieties together. I don’t know why they crossed, but he came up with this one. He used to sell plants individually to his neighbors and so forth, and, at least the legend is, he sold enough to pay off his mortgage.”

Price is about a lot more than tomatoes. His half-time, workaday job is as an electrotechnologist in genetics at Roswell Park. He uses a microscope to look at chromosomes from leukemia and cancer patients to diagnose their illness. “Through the microscope you can actually see the chromosomes and determine, in a lot of cases and in a lot of ways, whether they’re normal.” Patients with leukemia or cancer often develop chromosomal abnormalities as a result of the illness. Using cytogenetics, he helps diagnose what kind of leukemia they’re infected with, and he monitors treatment by observing chromosomal changes.

And all of this with only one science class—biology for non-majors—under his belt. “I was an English major at UB,” Price says, shrugging. “I thought I wanted to write, but I’ve never done anything with it but keep a journal and periodically throw out my journal.”

He “fell” into a job while in college, though, and he’s been in that field—when he’s not in the garden, that is—ever since.

People always tell Price that his job sounds interesting. “It makes interesting cocktail party talk, but the job itself is just a job,” he says. “I’m not a scientist, despite my job. That’s what I do for money. There are many more things that are more important to me, more fulfilling.”

Among them is singing. It’s a little-known fact that Price likes to dress up in a frock coat and top hat on the weekends to sing in what he calls a Victorian retro-pop group. He and four others form the Hutchinson Family Revival, a vocal group who reenacts what was probably the most popular musical group in America during the Victorian era, New Hampshire’s Hutchinson Family Singers.

“These people were women suffrage activists and abolitionists and teetotalers, and so they managed to bring all of that stuff into their music,” Price says enthusiastically. The Revival has keyboard accompaniment, but mostly sings a cappella. They play at museums and Civil War reenactments, but Price says they’re mulling a performance at this year’s Infringment Festival. “We might have to work on some campaign songs, what with the presidential election.”

At 68, Price has thinning gray hair, which he parts on the left, and bi-colored green and brown eyes that often appear sad or somber. A thick gray beard surrounds his mouth, and it’s turning white around his chin. When he speaks, he chooses his words carefully and tends to cock his right eyebrow. Just above that, his forehead is heavily creased and wrinkles upward on occasions when he laughs. When he does laugh, it seems to leap from this mouth, in a quick, surprising jumble.

I observe these characteristics in his kitchen on a cold, April showers afternoon, where he’s preparing to plant tomato seeds. First, he heaves a large, industrial-grade aluminum mixing bowl filled with dirt onto the counter. The dirt isn’t just any dirt: He’s already added rock powder, lime, bone meal, and green sand to the commercial seed starting mix, loading it with the fertilizer, phosphorous, and potassium that will ensure healthy plants.

Next he scoops soil into the six compartments of a plastic planter tray and pre-dampens it. The planter is starting to take on the look of a miniature farm with six fields. Price plows three perfect rows into each “field” and goes about the delicate work of planting the seeds.

“This probably seems excessive,” he says, transplanting each seed gingerly from his right hand into the rows with a pair of tweezers. “But it prevents having to thin them a lot. They’ll all be the same distance apart, and they’ll be easy to pot up once they get their true leaves.” Each row gets six or seven seeds, which means he’ll grow roughly 20 plants of each tomato variety. He’ll keep maybe three of each of several varieties, and the rest he’ll sell.

He covers the seeds over with a quarter-inch or so of soil. On top of that, he sprinkles vermiculite, which is expanded mica, to prevent a soil fungus called dampoff that often kills seedlings. The work is done, and he places the planters beneath fluorescent lights.

In five weeks I’ll return and Price will be transferring the plants—now three and four inches high—into yoghurt cups, where they’ll spend the final two weeks before his annual plant sale. At the sale, in keeping with tradition, he’ll pass on seemingly exotic, but entirely traditional, tomato varieties on to the local populace. He probably won’t make a killing on it, to be sure. “I don’t primarily do this stuff as a business venture,” he says. “I do it because I should.”

Richard Price’s annual plant sale occurs Saturday and Sunday, May 24 (9am-5pm) and 25 (10am-5pm) at his house, located at 47 Days Park.