COQUILLE — Forty-one varieties of the vegetable (or fruit, if you want to get technical), from plump Goliath’s to the small, sweet cherry types. Those were the fruits judges chomped into at Saturday’s tomato-taste off at the Coquille Pioneer Community Garden.

Judges tasted tomato after tomato, sampling each carefully before dozens of onlookers.

It was a tough gig for one judge.

“It wasn’t as much fun as you’d think,” said Mike Kelly.

The tomatoes were hit and miss, he said.

Kelly has a very discerning pallet, one he developed after many years of tasting veggies from his own garden.

“This is a hard climate to grow tomatoes in,” he said. “There isn’t enough heat.”

But Barb Butler was easier to impress. She graded on a curve.

“I tasted more potential in some tomatoes than my colleagues to the right,” Butler said.

Their differing opinions ultimately came together, though, when they tried Lois Renwick’s sun sugar variety. They agreed it was the top tomato.

Michael Minks’ gold nugget took second and Julie Wade’s honey bunch cherry came in third.

The trick to winning the taste-off?

“Grow something easy, like cherry tomatoes,” suggested Jerry Lowe, Renwick’s husband.

“It’s great to see what they did in such a small amount of time,” Renwick said.

The garden started growing grub less than a year after green-thumb types set the project into motion.

Nineteen beds produce a range of veggies. But the centerpiece produce at the grand opening celebration was tomatoes.

“They’re such a symbol of the season,” said Ann Ibach, board member of the Coquille Community Garden Association.

A man-sized bumble bee presided over the gathering.

“It’s a marvelous garden system,” said Steve Bone, donning a fuzzy suit on loan from the Sawdust Theatre. “I thought I’d fly by and buzz around.”

The garden, which sits behind the Pioneer Methodist Church on Baxter Street, was Minks’ idea. He is a teacher at the juvenile detention center in Coquille, where he encourages young people to grow their own food using several garden beds at the center.

“Instead of prison blues, we have prison greens,” said Minks, president of the Coquille Community Garden Association.

He saw the benefits of a public growing space. The notion received support from multiple organizations, including the Lady Bug Landing Community Garden in Coos Bay, Coquille Rotary Club and the Boy Scouts, among others. Elaine Steele, pastor of Pioneer United Methodist Church, offered up the land and the nonprofit agreed to a 5-year lease.

It’s also fortuitous that Ralph Foord, owner of the Auto Clinic on Baxter Street, is an avid gardener himself. The garden partially sits on his land. He removed some old vehicles to make way for it.

An estimated 2,000 hours of volunteer work and $6,000 of donated building supplies put it all together.

The garden also will help keep local food pantries stocked with fresh produce. To date, it has grown 312 pounds of food for families in need.

Garden club members pay an annual $10 fee.

“The price was meant to be kept minimal,” Minks said. “I knew people were hungry.”

Though if you want to rent one now, you’ll be put on a waiting list.

“All 19 beds were rented in a heartbeat," he said.