Yet, Tyabb market gardener Cheryl McGaffin has definitely mastered the art. She grows not just one or two varieties, or even a dozen, but a staggering 70 types of tomatoes.

“I’m not the traditional market gardener growing eight varieties and 100 of each one. I’d find that terribly boring,” Cheryl says.

Instead, the nurse grows one or two plants of each quirkily named cultivar, including black russian, pink bumblebee and chocolate stripes.

She and her partner, Tony Clarke, run Daniel’s Run Farm, growing heirlooms on one hectare of their eight-hectare property on the Mornington Peninsula. They plant in fresh soil each year, using a “pottager-style” design with insect-attracting flowers bordering every row of tomatoes.

Managing the plants is “a bit like having 70 babies,” Cheryl says, but insists she doesn’t do anything complicated.

“You’d be surprised at how little I do,” she says. “People ask me how I grow them, and I just take them out the back and show them the compost.”

She labours over a mountain of compost throughout the year and describes it as her secret weapon.

“It’s liquid gold. I load it up on the soil, then blanket-mulch with lucerne hay. I don’t use any liquid fertilisers. Maybe a handful of organic pelleted chicken manure per plant.”

In August, she starts plants in a small greenhouse from seed, which she has saved or has been passed down. She propagates to fresh garden beds in November, burying roots deep enough to cover several centimetres of stem. Two-metre tall cages support and protect each plant. To keep pests at bay she uses a bird-scaring speaker system and buys in beneficial insects, which eat aphids, caterpillars and mites.

Four years ago, Cheryl had such a surplus of heirlooms, she started selling to local farm-gate shops. Last July, chefs from Mornington’s Jackalope hotel saw Cheryl’s tomatoes on Instagram and contacted her to buy this season’s entire harvest.

“I was lucky that Jackalope liked the fact I was growing so many different varieties,” she says. “I think a combination gives you a better flavour.

“It’s like mixing wine.”

1CM

Matt’s wild cherry is Cheryl’s smallest variety, measuring just 1cm across. “Next year I think I will need to negotiate a different price for the cherry tomatoes because they take so long to pick and weigh next to nothing,” Cheryl says.

3.5M

Most of Cheryl’s plants grow to more than 3m tall. Her tallest this year was a cherry variety called lemon drop, which hit 3.5m. “Some people say the plants grow big with lots of foliage and less fruit if there is too much nitrogen in the soil. But I have plenty of fruit.”

3KG

Cheryl’s most prolific fruiter is barry’s crazy cherry, an oblong yellow tomato which sets in bunches and is sweet and tangy. Plants grow to 1.8m and produce about 3kg of fruit.

558G

According to 2016 data from Horticulture Innovation Australia, 86 per cent of Australian households buy fresh tomatoes and average 558g of tomatoes in their trolley per shopping trip.

2AM

Cheryl picks tomatoes at night, to avoid heat and birds. In peak season, from February through March, she harvests for more than four hours every evening, starting at dusk. “I have been out here until 2am picking by torchlight,” she says.

70

On their Tyabb property, Cheryl McGaffin and Tony Clarke grow 70 varieties of heirlooms including cherokee purple, green zebra, violet jasper, big bertha, mortgage lifter, brad’s atomic grape, pink brandywine, tigerella, juane flamme, sunrise bumblebee, rosso sicilian, paul robeson, tommy toe and blue beauty.

210,000

Cheryl releases about 210,000 parasitic wasps a year to help control pests. Capsules containing 1000 wasp larvae are stapled to each plant three times during the season.

750G

Cheryl’s biggest tomato this season was a chocolate stripe. “I weighed him, and he was about 750g,” she says. “But size isn’t everything in a tomato.”

700KG

Daniel’s Run Farm produces about 650-700kg of heirlooms a season. Chefs at Mornington hotel and restaurant Jackalope discovered Cheryl’s farm on Instagram and bought this season’s entire harvest. She has turned away other interested buyers because she does not produce enough to cater for more than one restaurant.

521,449

Victoria produced 26 per cent of Australia’s 521,449-tonne tomato harvest in 2015-16. Nearly the whole harvest was made up of four types: field, large truss, cherry and roma.