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The Garden Guy has a complicated relationship with tomatoes. Photo by Matt Sabo.
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Shishito and Buena Mulata Peppers. Photo by Matt Sabo.
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Late summer bounty. Photo by Matt Sabo.
Buckle up. I have a shocking confession. What I’m about to say, or write, is completely true. I’m not joking when I say this. But know that I’m not proud of it. No, I’ve wrestled with it over the years, tried to understand it. I did my best to overcome it, but alas—this thorn in my side remains.
At best, I’ve concealed this truth about me. At worst, I’ve lied. I’m through pretending. It’s time to come clean.
But before I confess, please understand how something can be 100% true and yet not exactly infallible. Honestly, there’s a complexity to what I’m about to reveal—some level of nuance. It doesn’t make me a bad person, just different is all. So here goes.
I don’t like tomatoes.
"Just like my relationship to the tomato, the tomato itself is a vexing plant, full of contradictions."
It hurts to write that. I love tomatoes and everything about them: their palette of colors from green through to yellow, pink, orange and red, from purple to black, some striped like lollipops, some even a ghostly white. Did you know tomato experts list 10,000 varieties of them? Approximately 9,993 of which will die not long after transplanting in Virginia’s disease-ridden, pest-befouling, torrential rain-dumping, sauna-like dog days of summer. But not all of them.
I love the tomato’s story of redemption. Centuries ago, Europeans and Americans rejected tomatoes when the invading Spaniards fetched them from Mexico via the coastal plains of Peru and Ecuador. The reviews that came back from Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England were at best 1-star, a stinging indictment of this New World show-and-tell item. They were thought ugly. Useless. Tasteless. Poisonous, even.
Now the world eats tomatoes with vigor. Raw, cooked, simmered and stewed. Sliced, diced, minced, sauced and soused. Americans even have an unnatural, crazed zeal for tomatoes (think ketchup on a steak). I’m fascinated by their shapes and sizes and colors, intrigued by their broad utility in the kitchen, and how they can transform a meal.
Misunderstood on the Vine
Are you confused? Let me explain.
When I say I don’t like tomatoes, what I mean is that I don’t like them straight up sliced. Like on a sandwich, or burger, or eaten in the raw like a juicy plum. I just find the taste disagreeable. It’s too strong, along the lines of a bad acidic trip. Am I a bad person? Perhaps. Or maybe my tastebuds are misaligned, or too sensitive, or deficient, or whatever.
garden pungent yellow onions and sweat-
inducing purple Buena Mulata peppers. A few shakes of garlic salt, a squeeze or two of lime, fresh chopped cilantro and my mouth literally starts to water in Pavlovian anticipation as I toss it all together. The salt, acid and heat unite in a harmonious gastro-epiphany. A whole bag of tortilla chips vanishes.
Or, I can pick two pounds of striking purplish- reddish Midnight Roma tomatoes and channel my inner Marcella Hazan. I throw them in the pot, blanched and skinned. From the garden, I wash and cut in halves a sweet yellow onion and a green pepper. Into the pot they go. Next, a stick of butter. Finally, kosher salt, pepper and fresh leaves of fragrant basil and oregano. I slurp the savory sauce as soup or toss it with pasta.
My dislike of a raw, solitary tomato is a brutal truth I confront every time I step into my garden. The very center of my garden, its essence and meaning, is built around this little fruit my tastebuds reject.
It’s Complicated
Just like my relationship to the tomato, the tomato itself is a vexing plant, full of contradictions. For example, it’s easy to grow and impossible to grow. By July, I have a dozen or more tomato plants that succumbed to disease. I yank the dead brown stalks from the ground and mentally jot down the variety. I banish them forever from my garden. Goodbye, Cherokee Purple and Thorburn’s Terra-Cotta. Nice try.
Others are producing buckets of fruits, as if they are born and raised in a Garden of Eden. Bless you, Midnight Roma, Orange Icicle, Amish Paste and Mortgage Lifter. This is the very crux of the gardener’s life: Life and death intertwined. Euphoria and heartache knit together. Inseparable.
Even as many of my beloved tomato plants brown and wither, I plant more starts through the summer, going heavy on the Midnight Romas and Amish Pastes and Orange Icicles that resist the dastardly diseases that fell their cousins. My eyes remain intent on fall bounty with these plantings. Honestly, it’s the very definition of insanity.
Gardening Ever in His Right Mind
Insanity is at the core of every gardener’s being. Truly. Because I keep planting things in my garden through the summer, expecting them to grow and produce veggies. Like it’s that easy. Sometimes it is. I poke the soil and in goes a new variety of zucchini-style squash called “Centercut” I found at Row 7 Seeds.
To my great amazement, it defied bugs, pestilence, the oppressive July heat and humidity, downpours and rodents, to thrive. The squash are beautiful, the taste nutty and sweet. Alas, they are taking over my garden. I wrestle vines from my neighbor’s yard back into the garden. We have Centercut squash three times a day and I make chocolate chip zucchini muffins by the dozen, giving some away, freezing Ziploc gallon bags of others for winter.
By late summer, my butternut squash I planted in June are climbing over trellises and snaking through rows of dry beans, peppers, basil and zinnias. They’re everywhere, mingling with the Centercut squash. Whatever semblance of orderly rows I had now disappear into oceans of ground-hugging vines. But those intruding vines yield shapely squash heading for a perfect fall ripening. And hey, they’re growing.
In late July, perhaps because heat affects my cognitive ability, I find a little square of soil in my garden and plant four almost neat rows of corn. It’s short-season corn I find at Gloucester Supply in Hayes. I’m 60 days to sweetness, allegedly. We’ll see.
I rip out a row of fading pole beans and make room for sugar snap peas a daughter gave me in February. I dream of stir-fry … and my thoughts turn to carrots! Must … plant … carrots. But where? Aha! The sunflowers next to my shed have about run their course. They were delightful, but what’s a good stir-fry without carrots? Or broccoli? Yes, broccoli! I wedge in broccoli plants wherever I can find sunlight. It’s not madness if it makes sense.
Eat and Be Merry
Come October, the sun travels lower across the southern horizon. Shadows lengthen. Leaves wither and crunch. The garden turns colorless. Flannel in the morning, flannel in the evening.
I’m tired. Tired of weeding. Tired of pests. Tired of the heartbreak of disease, mildew, fungus and the chunky woodchuck I keep chasing out of my garden with a pitchfork.
Still, it’s been a great, tasty run. Canned five quarts of green beans. Froze a couple dozen quarts of pasta sauce for the winter. The dry beans are in jars ready to be soaked and simmered. The butternut squash is in the garage, ready for roasting.
The weather app on my iPhone is a thumb tap away. I watch for frost, trying to eke the last bit of ripeness out of the peppers, beans and squash that hang on for dear life in the last lingering warmth of fall. When I see frost coming, I pluck the last of the veggies.
By early November, a killer frost leaves the remaining plants a blackish-greenish goo. I pitchfork it into a wheelbarrow and dump it in my trailer. I linger for a moment and stare. The dun-colored soil stripped bare. Denuded. Lifeless. Honestly, it’s sad.
But I have a plan. I wheel the seed spreader out of the shed. Two words: Cover crops. It’s a medley of legumes, grass, small grain, broadleaf plants and brassicas. They will, in the words of Sow True Seed, “work together to loosen topsoil, penetrate and loosen compacted soil and hardpan layers, increase soil aggregation and aeration, suppress weeds and undesirable insects, and add biotic materials to support microbial life.”
I’m speechless. I feel like I will literally have to do nothing next season to my garden except plant seeds. I’ll sit in my lawn chair in the cool shade of the maple tree, sip sweet tea and watch my garden grow beautiful veggies, amazing veggies while repelling all manner of disease, fungus, mildew, insects, pests, turtles, hedgehogs, rabbits and the like.
I cannot wait for spring.
Would you like to read more stories from The Garden Guy? Email our editor at morgan@localscoopmagazine.com.
