Got tomatoes?

Don’t bring your extras to Chuck Magerl. He’s got all he can handle.

Magerl, owner of Free State Brewing Co., 636 Mass., and his wife, Joey, cultivate about 350 tomato plants in a 23,000-square-foot garden on their 18 acres of land just east of Lawrence.

“Our garden is primarily devoted to tomatoes. We’ve probably got six different varieties, and we’ve got them bracketed with sunflowers, zinnias and gladiolas just to brighten things up,” Chuck says.

The couple is addicted to working in the garden and harvesting a bounty of produce.

“I suppose it’s one of those foolish things. You’d think with all my time working in the food industry, my spare time would be spent golfing. But I enjoy just about all aspects of food from the ground up,” he says.

Each week, Magerl brings in hundreds of pounds of fresh tomatoes of such varieties as Celebrity, Jet Star, San Marzano, Roma and Sunmaster to use in dishes served at Free State.

“They go in a whole array of items. This time of year we’ll be featuring a lot of salads with tomatoes on them, tomatoes in some of the daily special appetizers, as well as the slices that are on the plates with sandwiches,” he says.

“Even the diced tomatoes that are topping some of the dishes like the black bean quesadillas are fresh from the garden. It just shows through — you can see the vibrancy of a bright red, fresh tomato.”

Chuck Magerl picks tomatoes from his 23,000-square-foot garden just east of Lawrence. Magerl uses the tomatoes in dishes at his restaurant, Free State Brewing Co., 636 Mass.

The Magerls are just a few of the many enthusiasts of homegrown tomatoes in the Lawrence area. Pretty much anyone with a vegetable garden is likely to include at least a few tomato plants.

And legions of people routinely show up at the Farmers Market, in the 1000 block of Vermont Street, to choose among a vast variety of tomatoes — both hybridized and heirloom — grown in and around Lawrence.

Simply put, garden-fresh tomatoes are an enduring icon of summer eating.

“Last year at the peak of the season, we were harvesting 200 pounds a day. They’re getting made into sauces and salsas and things like that (at Free State),” Magerl says.

“It’s great to be able to actually answer people’s questions about what kinds of varieties I have, how the plants are doing and what went into that tomato that reached their plate.”

Thin skinned, great taste

Barbara Clark knows the joys of growing and eating your own tomatoes.

“There’s nothing better than just slicing a fresh tomato on your plate with a little salt and pepper on them. We can a bunch of tomatoes so we can have them in the winter; then you make spaghetti sauce that tastes right out of the garden,” says Clark, owner of Maggie’s Farm, about two miles north of the Lawrence Municipal Airport.

She and her husband, David, have 20 acres of land, roughly three quarters of which is planted with vegetables. She’s been selling their produce at the Lawrence Farmers Market for eight years.

She’s well known for her heirloom tomatoes.

“I grow heirloom pretty much exclusively, lots of old varieties. They have great flavor. Plus, you can save the seeds and plant them next year, and you know you’ll have that variety again. That’s just the characteristic of an heirloom tomato, where with hybridized tomatoes, you can’t do that,” Clark says.

“Heirlooms are sort of getting more and more popular because they do taste so good. Their downside for market is that they have a thin skin, and they’re not uniformly round, so they’re harder to pack. They’re not bred for keeping, they’re bred for immediate consumption. That’s one of the qualities that hybrids have been selected for: They can be shipped 1,500 miles.”

Early in the season, during the first few weeks of the farmers market, Clark sells heirloom varieties of tomato plants to eager customers. The plants are about six weeks old and have been placed in peat pots for easy planting.

Clark’s tomatoes have had a hard time this year due to hot weather and hungry deer.

Dan Sieber slices up tomatoes at Free State Brewing Co., 636 Mass. The Lawrence restaurant features garden tomatoes in many of its dishes during the summer.

“But there will still be great tomatoes down at the market. Some mighty fine tomatoes,” she says.

Good, healthy meal

Count Kitty Glass among those for whom large-scale, commercially grown tomatoes simply won’t do.

They’ve got to come from a well-tended garden — preferably her own.

“There’s no comparison. You can go to the grocery store, and even the Hot House tomatoes taste like cardboard. With vine-ripened tomatoes, there’s no comparison. They’re just bursting with flavor. They’re real crisp, not mushy, and the juice goes flying everywhere,” she says.

She and her husband, Mike, own Whispering Cedars Farm & Gardens, located about 12 miles south of Lawrence.

Mike raises a variety of vegetables, such as tomatoes, garlic, onions, okra and fingerling potatoes, as well as free-range, hormone-free beef. Kitty has field-grown perennial flowers.

Mike is growing five varieties of tomatoes this year: Black Krim and Black Tula, heirlooms that originated in Russia; Golden Nugget, a yellow cherry tomato; Sweet Baby Girl, a new hybrid cherry tomato; and Matt’s Wild Cherry, which comes from Mexico.

He has 50 to 60 tomato plants, and he sells their fruit at the Farmers Market.

“I just love these Russian ones. They’re called black; they get a very deep, dark burgundy color. As you get farther down in the tomato, they get more red than black. They’re very meaty, very delicious. Imagine a tomato taste, and then multiply it by 10,” he says.

The Glasses enjoy their tomatoes all through the growing season, which typically lasts from mid-July to the first frost.

“The way we eat most of our tomatoes is by themselves, just snackin’ on them,” Mike says.

“The Matt’s Wild Cherry, we fry up with okra, onions, garlic and make a burrito out of it. You just lightly stir fry it in a little bit of oil. It’s a good, healthy meal.”