Huge Tomatoes Grow on Coviello Vines

Mike and Peter Coviello have high hopes for their heirloom tomatoes this year. 

The largest tomato from their 2012 crop weighed 2 pounds, 5.2 ounces and measured 5.75 inches by 6.5 inches, but at least one tomato growing this year looks like it could be even larger.

"We're very confident it will be bigger than last year," local gardener Paul Suszczynski, a friend of the Coviello brothers, said. "Not only that, but I'm getting 20 or 30 tomatoes on a single vine. That's unheard of."

Mike Coviello gave Suszczynski some of his Rose of Italy heirloom tomato seeds this year for Suszczynski to grow on his own, to see if he could get similar results as the Coviellos have gotten in their years of growing the tomatoes.

"I have about three plants growing in unidentified places," Suszczynski said. "Not even Mike knows where they are." 

Suszczynski, an experienced gardener himself, said he's learning horticultural secrets from the Coviellos: the right soil conditions, when and what to trim and not to trim, "all the bits and pieces" to make tomatoes grow, he said. "The size, the method, that's what this is really about."

Peter and Mike Coviello came to America from Italy in 1958 with a family history of horticulture, one they continued to develop as the owners of Coviello Bros. gardening center and nursery in Madison. They use a tract of land in Florham Park to grow plants and products for their store, and some of their personal plants as well.

This was where the brothers first started growing their Rose of Italy tomatoes, named after their mother, Rosaria. For over 10 years the brothers have saved the seeds from their best tomatoes for planting the next year. Over time this heirloom tomato has become its own variety, the Rose of Italy, which was studied by Peter Nitzsche of Rutgers University in 2012.

Heirloom tomatoes are often self-pollinated, though purposeful cross-pollination is also common. "However, there will be genetic diversity from that cross, so you’d have to save the better seeds from that cross," Nitzsche said. For example, "If there's medium and large plants [from the cross-pollination] and you pick only the large, over time you clean up that variety."

"Every year it gets bigger and bigger," Mike said.

When asked what the secret of growing such large tomatoes, Peter Coviello, a resident, said, "When you plant anything in fresh soil with good drainage, you have everything you need."

For Mike Coviello, his efforts over the years were "for love of tomatoes," he said, "for pride in what we did."