FARMER

When winter starts to wain and the promise of spring gives you hope, you bring home with you, green growing things and great expectations. I do it every year. But this year I was far away, returned late in May. With perennials in front of the house I didn’t have to put much stuff in the ground but all of my containers were stored. Everyone I knew had their plants established while I rummaged through left overs at the lawn & garden store. There were some good buys, plants that weren’t perfect, passed over and now just hoping to drop their roots somewhere before being recycled in the compost heap. It was the fist week of June before my plants were all in. Two weeks later everything looked fine, except for the tomatoes. 

Flowers have always been good to me, give them a drink now and then and pull a few weeds. But my luck with tomatoes has been nothing but bad. If it’s not caterpillars or white flies it’s blossom-end-rot or mold. But they had great deals on healthy plants that should have been in the ground a month earlier. So I bought six, made them at home in 20 gallon pots. By the time they acclimated and got their roots in gear it was July. Everybody else had little green tomatoes and mine were still growing a root network. I figured they would come late but with a little luck, I would get some tomatoes.

In September, as green tomatoes began to turn, yellow first then into orange, I discovered that neighborhood squirrels had been watching them too. There was a yellow-pink tomato that would be just right in two or three days. When I checked again, it had been gnawed on, through the skin into the meaty flesh, just enough for flies to gain access and torpedo the salad I had planned. So I started harvesting firm, yellow-pink fruits keeping just ahead of the squirrels. They ripen on my countertop instead of vine ripened, like the samples down at Farmer’s Market. But I had tomatoes. 

So now it’s October, short days and cool nights, what’s left on the vines will not ripen in the sun. Plants aren’t stupid. They know, at least the annuals, when nights turn cool and sunlight goes away, they look in the mirror and say to themselves, “OMG, I’m so old. I don’t have much time left.” It’s programmed into the DNA, when the odds go against you and your time is short, reproduce. Bloom again, make new fruits; it’s all about the seeds. “If I”m going to perish, at least I can seed a new generation.” So that’s what they do and they spend all of their remaining energy on new blooms and whatever tomatoes are left, are left hanging like orphans. Then I come along and see the new blooms, tell the late tomatoes, in tomato talk, “You guys have been disinherited, you get nothing from now on. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll spread you out in the kitchen and you can ripen there, listen to the radio, watch me eat cereal in the morning.” They are smart enough, know that however their destiny plays out, they won’t be back in the spring. I collected all of my October tomatoes today, leaving the parent plants to fret over blossoms that will never set fruit. Between slicers and summer salad, my little harvest will last a week or so. The green ones may not make it to ripe; may have to do the fried green thing, dredged in garlic and pepper flour. If I had bib overhauls and a straw hat I could look the part.