THE TOMATO MAN; RETIRED CARPENTER SEEING RED WITH 600 PLANTS IN VALLEY YARD.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Staff Writer

With the temperature nearing 100 and the humidity not far behind, Delbert Winkler - a straw hat shading his eyes his only concession to the weather - prowls up and down row after row of tomato plants, looking for ripe fruit and signs that the plants need water.

Some would say it's ironic: He couldn't wait to leave his father's Ohio farm 70 years ago, and here he is, growing tomatoes in Canoga Park.

``This isn't farming,'' Winkler said with a grin. ``This is my hobby. It keeps me busy.''

The 84-year-old retired carpenter, who helped build hundreds of Valley homes before he retired 20 years ago, spends his summers tending about 600 organic tomato plants on his corner lot, watering and fertilizing - and coming up with tomatoes ranging from the size of a baby's thumb to the size of a softball.

Bite into one of Winkler's tomatoes and you can taste sun and blue skies and picnics and the Fourth of July. It's the taste of summer, just beneath a thin, red skin - a taste Winkler loves.

``Fresh, sliced tomatoes are on our table at least twice a day,'' said Winkler, who also keeps a salt shaker handy on a ledge outside the garage for in-the-garden sampling. ``But there's just the two of us, and we can't eat 'em all.''

His wife, Margaret, freezes and cans as much as she can, and many go into homemade spaghetti sauce. But many more are sold at 90 cents a pound (a makeshift sandwich board directs buyers to his garage, where a digital scale, plastic bags and buckets of tomatoes sit in the bed of his battered pickup truck), and many more are given away.

``I'm a regular customer,'' said neighbor Alice Pace, bagging her own tomatoes and sliding them onto the scale. ``I eat 'em like apples.''

``They are the most delicious things I have ever, ever, ever, ever eaten,'' said neighbor Joan Benson, as she picked out ripe tomatoes for dinner - and two more cars pulled up in front of the garage. ``I wait every year for Del's tomatoes. They're so good.

Winkler never set out to be the neighborhood's tomato king. Although he decided long ago that farming wasn't the career for him, he and his wife have almost always had a small kitchen garden, which grew after he retired. Soon he was producing more than he could even give away.

``Squash, I'd pile up in a wheelbarrow in the front yard for people to take,'' Winkler said. ``And beans ... well, we love beans, but how many beans can you can?''

Four years ago, he decided to concentrate on tomatoes.

He buys his plants - each one strong and dark-colored, with sturdy stalks - at local nurseries in six-packs priced at $1.20 or less. He plants the same kinds every year: Red Cherry, Large Red Cherry, Better Boy, Celebrity, Big Beef, Floramerica, Big Boy, Early Girl and Beef Master.

After the first year, he began to save the seeds from the best cherry tomatoes and replant them.

The cherries from his own seeds are the first to go into the ground in late March or early April, the seeds sowed in a well-tilled quarter-acre with plenty of horse manure (free from a Chatsworth boarding stable) and bagged steer manure from the nursery. When the newly sprouted plants are a few inches tall, he transplants them into neat rows about 25 feet long.

This year, cherries cover four rows on both ends of his garden, the plants grown from his saved seeds towering nearly 7 feet in the air. Another row, nearly as tall, gets its support from the garage wall.

In between those rows grow large tomatoes, in bushy rows with barely enough room to walk between them, in stages of ripeness ranging from green to mottled green-and-red to the vivid red that means they're ready for dinner tonight. The plants, which hang heavy with fruit, are supported on wires strung between 2-inch-square wooden stakes. In places where leaves are sparse, Winkler throws a burlap bag over the ripening tomatoes so they don't get burned by the hot sun.

This year, he picked his first tomato July 10, and expects his crop to last into September, depending on the weather.

There's no secret to growing such enormous tomatoes, Winkler admits.

``Get the best plants, healthy ones,'' he advised.

In addition to digging manure into the soil, two or three times a summer he gives his tomatoes a drink of manure tea, which he makes by dumping a bag of steer manure into a 32-gallon garbage can.

``Let it set a couple days, then stir it up and water your plants with it,'' he said. ``It smells a little but, but so what? It works.''

He lets the weather dictate his watering schedule.

``I take a rake or a hoe and scratch and see what color the dirt is,'' Winkler said. ``If it's dark, it's wet and doesn't need more water; if it's dry, it gets a drink.''

Each row of plants stands in a furrow that's his irrigation system.

``I run water from the garden hose down the furrow. When it gets to the far end, it's enough.''

The birds that flock to his apricot and peach trees also patrol his tomato patch for puffy green tomato worms. Winkler only occasionally finds a worm himself, even though he doesn't protect his plants with pesticides.

``If I find any, they're my foot immediately,'' he said.

Although he's planted the same kind of tomatoes for four years in a row, he still gets an occasional surprise. This year, a couple of six-packs of Celebrity, a mid-size round tomato, turned out to be a strange-shaped giant he doesn't recognize: It resembles an oval-shaped Roma, a meaty paste tomato, on serious steroids.

``Dunno what it is, but it's growing real well,'' he said with a grin.

So far, this year seems to be a prime year for tomato growing, a relief after last year's unseasonable El Nino summer.

``Last year was a bummer,'' Winkler said. ``It rained and it was cold and I lost hundreds of plants. But this year, it's hot and dry, and tomatoes like the heat.''

So does he, a legacy from more than 30 years laboring as a carpenter in the Valley summers.

When the tomatoes are all picked and the plants turning dry and brown, usually in mid- to late September, Winkler pulls them all up, spreads on a layer of horse manure and tills the fertilizer in, getting ready for next spring.

``I just go crazy in the winter, when I can't have a garden,'' he said. ``Maybe growing all these tomatoes is a little ridiculous, but it gives me something to do.''

Make tomatoes last by drying your surplus

When your entire tomato crop ripens at once, and you've eaten and given away all you can, it might be time to preserve some of your harvest in one of man's oldest ways: drying.

If you don't own a fancy dehydrator, you can still dry tomatoes using the oven of your gas or electric stove. Or you can dry them in the sun, as our ancestors did.

According to the National Gardening Association, you should choose tomatoes for drying that are ripe but firm and unblemished. The best tomatoes for drying have more pulp and fewer seeds and gel inside; prime varieties are La Roma, San Marzano, Principe Borghese, Lemon Boy, Italian Gold, Sun Gold or Sweet 100.

Wash the tomatoes and pat them dry. Slice one-quarter to one-half inch thick; cut the Sweet 100s in half.

For traditional sun drying, wait until the weatherman forecasts several days of 90-degree-plus temperatures with humidity below 20 percent and full sun.

Use a clean plastic mesh screen; a metal screen will react with the acid in the tomatoes. Position the screen outside in the sun a foot or more off the ground; place tomato slices on the screen, at least an inch apart so air can circulate, and cover with weighted down cheesecloth (or another screen) to protect from insects and birds.

Bring the screens inside at night, then return them to their sunny spot the next day.

The tomato slices should be leathery, but soft, in three days to seven days.

To oven-dry tomatoes, wash and slice tomatoes and place on racks on backing sheets. Place in oven with temperature set below 150 degrees Farenheit. Tomatoes should be dried in six to 12 hours.

Using either method, expect 1 pound of fresh tomatoes to produce a little more than 1 ounce of dried tomatoes.

Store dried tomatoes in airtight bags, squeezing out excess air, or in glass jars and keep in a cool, dry, dark place for up to six months. Or refrigerate in airtight containers for up to eight months, or freeze for up to a year.

Use dried tomatoes as-is in salads, sandwiches, pizzas, or rehydrate and chop for sauces and other dishes. To rehydrate, soak tomatoes for 10 minutes in warm water or wine.

For more information on preserving your tomato harvest, check out the U.S. Department of Agriculture Guide to Home Canning (regularly $20 in print form) for free at www.foodsafety.org/canhome.htm on the Internet

And for tomato recipes, heirloom seed catalogs, and guides to home canning and freezing, access the California Tomato Commission's Web site at www.tomato.org.

If you're already planning next year's harvest and want only the best seeds, check out www.njtomato.com to get free seeds from champion New Jersey tomatoes. (The biggest one so far in the 23-year-old contest weighed more than 6 pounds. This year's contest won't be judged until later this summer.)

Squeeze out an extra crop

Summertime means no school, longer days and yummy backyard tomatoes. But unlike academics and the seasons that come and go - ready or not - there is a way to prolong that final hot-weather treat.

If you do it right, you can have fresh tomatoes on the table for Thanksgiving - even for Christmas.

According to championship growers from New Jersey, who each year hold a weigh-off for $82,000 in prize money, it's not hard to use the tomato plants you have growing right now to start a second, late-summer tomato plot.

For a fall tomato crop, according to the New Jersey Championship Tomato Weigh-In - America's No. 1 Big Tomato Contest, here's how to do it:

Two months before cold weather sets in (that can be as late as early September most years in the Los Angeles area), look over your tomato plants and find sucker shoots - shoots that grow from the juncture of a main stalk and a leaf - with flower buds on them.

Cut suckers at least 8 inches long, and strip the leaves off. Be careful not to disturb the buds.

Put the stem in water for a few hours, then plant in loose, moist soil; mound the soil around the sucker.

Set a basket (to keep pests and too much light and heat out) over the sucker for five days; water several times a day for the first four days.

In the second week, feed with an organic fertilizer, following package directions. Your plant should have set roots by the second week, and is on its way to a second harvest in 60 to 70 days.

CAPTION(S):

10 Photos, 3 Boxes

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) GROWTH INDUSTRY

Life is ripe with possibilities for busy retiree and his 600 tomato plants

(2--Color) Delbert Winkler, 84, of Canoga Park, says he never wanted a career in farming and calls tending his 600 organic plants ``my hobby.''

(3--Color) no caption (Tomatoes)

(4--Color) Winkler expects to be picking tomatoes through September.

(5--Color) Big Beef

(6--Color) Celebrity

(7--Color) Early Girl

(8--Color) Roma VF

(9--Color) Supersweet 100s

(10--Color) Yellow Pear

Photos by Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer

Box: (1) Make tomatoes last by drying your surplus (See text)

(2) Squeeze out an extra crop (See text)

(3) Popular tomato varieties