Home-grown Tomatoes

If you love home grown tomatoes and if you live in the Midwest with a nice sized backyard, you will probably want a summer garden to grow your very own red, juicy beauties.

Quite possibly, you love home grown tomatoes because you grew up with a garden, a huge one, you were expected to help weed and to help pick -- tomatoes, okra, corn, asparagus, strawberries.  Maybe you had a dad who loved to garden and a mom who loved the vegetables, but grumbled about all the canning.  (Now that you are an adult, you do understand that.)


And chances are, though you remember griping about all the weeding (and perhaps you even remember complaining to your elementary school friends about summer beginning because now you would have to weed the garden all the time), you now understand the beauty of gardening, even the weeding, maybe even especially the weeding.  You understand the solitude of the garden. Working alone, sweat dripping down your back, clearing the soil of weeds, creating order. You still feel that childish rush of pride all these years later in knowing the difference between a corn seedling and a weed.  You still delight in the pungent organic smell of tomato plants.


You may remember all these things, savor them mentally, and vow to plant a big ol' rural-Oklahoma style garden next summer.


But life will be as busy as ever when tilling and planting time comes... and goes. You will mentally settle for a tomato plant or two and maybe some dill or zucchini. And then more time will pass and your dad will possibly ask when you want him to bring some tomato plants over.  He will have started all sorts of varieties in his greenhouse during the spring and he'll be anxious for you to plant some of them. More time will pass.  You will probably look out your kitchen window while hand washing a few dishes and you will see the barren garden and feel guilty you've continued to neglect it.


Finally, your dad will relent.  You hadn't intended that to be the result, but you won't feel disappointed either.  He will till the garden for you.  He will plant tomato plants.  You wanted a couple of plants.  He will plant five.  That's okay.  You don't have to eat each and every tomato.  You can share.  Maybe you'll puree and freeze some.  Maybe you'll waste a few.

Special tomato-slicing knife

When that first full, fragrant tomato reddens, you will slice it with the special tomato-slicing knife you received for Christmas a few years ago.  You will prepare a turkey sandwich on 12-grain bread -- green leafy lettuce, cheese, mayo, celery salt and a fat juicy slice of tomato.  It will taste so transcendentally delicious you will make another sandwich.  Forget about chips or a cookie for dessert; two tomato-laden turkey sandwiches will do.


You will document your first turkey-with-homegrown-tomato sandwich of the year as your Facebook status.

The summer will progress.  You'll savor more tomatoes.  Your husband will eat some of them like apples, squirting mustard on each as he goes.  (A strategy he learned from you.)  Sometimes you will eat so many tomatoes, you'll get canker sores.  And over time, you will no longer appreciate the tomatoes quite so much as you first did.  You will give away more and more.  You will pick less frequently, allowing some to rot on the vine in the blazing summer heat.


When fall arrives, bringing increasingly harder freezes, and the vines begin to droop, you will once again neglect your garden.  Now when you look out that kitchen window, you'll see a garden patch in need of clearing.  You know it won't be much work, just a few minutes of tearing out vines and dragging them to the compost and a few moments of stacking the tomato cages under the deck.  If you've thought ahead, maybe you'll spread around coffee grounds collected from the local barista.


There's a good chance though that even in December, those vines will still be there, black, ugly, sagging, evidence of the difficult months that preceded this one.  But one afternoon, you just might look out that kitchen window and see magic.  


To be continued...