Couple’s tomatoes a garden show hit

Steve and Elizabeth Casteel, as madly in love as Adam and Eve, live in what they affectionately call “the garden of eatin’.”

It’s a small lot on the bustling corner of University Road and Broadway Avenue in Spokane Valley, not too far from the Sauerkraut Guy. Everybody knows the Sauerkraut Guy; he sells more flavors of sauerkraut out of the back of his house than Baskin-Robbins sells ice cream. Just head east down Broadway until you see the Sauerkraut Guy’s 41 flavors of sauerkraut sign and then hang a left on University, Elizabeth Casteel said. That’s how you get to the garden of eatin’.

The Casteels are also pretty well known around Spokane, but not by name. Elizabeth Casteel is known among the garden set as “the Tomato Lady.” She grows about 1,900 tomato plants every year, starting them by seed in the couple’s dining room. She sells them on Mother’s Day weekend every year at the Inland Empire Gardeners Club Garden Expo. At the expo, Steve Casteel is known as Mr. Tomato Lady.

Saturday, they were the hit of the show.

“That’s our last tomato,” Elizabeth Casteel shouted, as an elderly couple walked away with the her final carton – a sausage tomato, or lycopersicon esculentum, excellent for ketchup, paste or sauces.

“Time of death,” shouted Steve Casteel, to his son Steve Jr., who called the sale over at 3:05 p.m., as Mr. Tomato Lady whooped, “We sold out.”

The 200 vendors around them still had plenty to sell. The one-day expo ended at 5 p.m.

Over the years, the Tomato Lady has cultivated a near cult-like following. The roots of her popularity stretch back to a South Hill neighborhood where, growing tomatoes for herself, Casteel was often short on garden space, but long on leafy green tomato plants.

There just wasn’t a variety she didn’t want to grow, Elizabeth Casteel explained Saturday. So she grew them all, leaving the ones she couldn’t care for on the edge of her driveway, like babies in bassinettes for some stranger to nurture. Neighbors would come by anonymously in mid-day and rescue a tomato plant. Sensing there was a buck to be made, but not wanting to go commercial, Elizabeth Casteel added a coffee can to her lineup of red-orbed orphans.

Observing the honor system, neighbors paid the Tomato Lady whatever they considered fair.

“I’ve been buying Elizabeth and Steve’s tomatoes for four or five years. They have great tomatoes and they’re a wonderful story,” said Jeanell Malone, of Spokane. “It’s my first stop.”

The Tomato Lady was an early stop for a quite a few people, who took home roughly 75 percent of the Casteels’ inventory before the expo was just two hours old. Expo show manager Chris Sheppard estimated the day’s crowd at roughly 10,000. Seven years old, the event has become a spring thing for local gardeners. The Inland Empire Gardeners didn’t have a second expo day to offer patrons, but they were promoting an evening with New York Times garden columnist Ken Druse on Aug. 4. Tickets for the general public are $10.

Sheppard sat in the shade of a garden booth adjoining the Tomato Lady’s and assessed the Casteels’ picked-clean tables.

There were no more sweet, tangy Czechoslovakian Stupice tomatoes, or meaty, practically seedless Oregon springs. The Casteels had sold out of Vera pepper tomatoes, guaranteed red, ripe and hollow for stuffing before summer’s end. And they didn’t have any smoky, purple heirloom tomatoes, the kind seldom found in the grocery store.

Fruit from the garden of eatin’ had proved too tempting.