Planting Tomatoes
I began this morning as I do most mornings these days, by pulling back the curtain and staring out at the tomato plants growing right outside my window. I check the growth on the low hanging Big Boys…that appear not to be there today (Rats! Damn woodchucks!), and the clusters of cherry tomatoes that hang like grapes from another plant, anxiously awaiting the day they will show signs of ripening.
I planted my little tomato garden just before falling and the eight plants have been growing like weeds, no doubt due to the healthy layer of manure applied to the area last fall. Some are taller than I am, and all have been tied up to the tall metal stakes (actually rebars pounded into place last year by my neighbor Mike) to keep them off the ground and away from the marauding slugs.
Like almost everyone I know, I plant tomatoes every year. My father always planted tomatoes and I suspect his father before him planted them, too. I plant them, I water them, I weed them and I feed them. I watch over them as if they were my children and puff up with pride as they grow big and strong, and rejoice when they safely reach maturity.
I do all this without ever giving it a second thought. It’s what I do…I grow tomatoes.
Although we lived in a fourth floor tenement surrounded by concrete, my father always had a garden, planted on a large plot of land loaned to him by a friend on Desmarais St. in Cumberland. All summer long, my father would come home from work, have supper, and then head up to work on the garden until it got too dark to see. Most of the time we all went with him. My mother would sit in the car reading the newspaper. My three sisters and I would start out helping, pulling weeds until we could safely melt away into the surrounding brush and then we were off “exploring.”
The garden was enormous, almost the size of a house lot, with every square foot turned over by hand and then neatly separated into sections. There were green peppers, cucumbers, onions, potatoes, scallions that my parents always called “rareripes,” and tomatoes. Always tomatoes. Staked up on tripods fashioned from hand-cut sticks salvaged from the surrounding woods, tomatoes made up the largest section of the garden.
Some of my best memories were of the tomatoes and the case upon case of quart jars of tomatoes canned every fall and stores in our little cubicle in the cellar for use in the almost daily pots of soup that I looked forward to all winter long. Store-bought canned tomatoes are okay, but they can’t hold a candle to the home canned ones.
My very favorite garden memory, though, is of the little ritual that always surrounded the picking of the very first ripe tomato of the summer.
My father would wipe the tomato clean with his hands and hold it up to be admired. Then he would reach into his pocket, take out his pocketknife, and carefully cut the tomato into sections so that each one present got an equal share. The bliss of biting into that juicy red wedge still warm from the sun was pure heaven.
Last week my daughter-in-law Lisa picked the very first tiny little cherry tomato from my garden and gave it to me. I briefly considered reviving my father’s sharing ritual, but at scarcely a half inch in diameter it would have been kind of silly. So I put it to one side and ate it with my supper.
