LAKE VERMILION— Jimmy Laine is no stranger to music fans in the region, but he is perhaps less known for his accidental gardening exploits. As anyone who gardens heirloom vegetables knows, the best seeds always come with a story, and there is certainly one behind the giant tomato that Laine brought into the Timberjay office last week.
It was huge, about six inches across and weighed just shy of two pounds. While I didn’t taste it, Laine insists they’re delicious, and he should know since he’s been growing them since 2016 from a few seeds he saved from a giant tomato given to him by Annie Lind the year before. Lind was cooking at Wolf Bay Lodge back in 2015 and Laine had been playing drums there on Tuesday nights and they often traded good stuff to eat, like Lind’s garden produce for Laine’s home-smoked meats.
After enjoying that first tomato, which filled out four BLT sandwiches with tomato to spare, he asked Lind for the story behind it. She told him it came from a VA officer in Hibbing who had gotten the seeds from a WWII vet who had saved them while deployed in Palermo, Sicily. He had been growing the tomatoes since the war and they’ve gotten passed around over the years and have made an appearance in any number of Iron Range gardens in the more than 75 years since the war.
Laine says the tomato, which he calls his “Mafia tomato” is prolific and that this is the first variety of tomato he’s ever had success growing at his home on Pike Bay.
One interesting side note is that Laine’s father served during the war on a destroyer that was torpedoed and nearly sunk during the battle of Palermo in July, 1943. His ship, which was commanded at the time by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., the president’s son, subsequently docked at Palermo to undergo repairs.