By Kerri Havnen Gordon
Picture this: It’s 6:15 a.m. on a Saturday in early May. You’re out walking your dog when something catches your eye as you pass a house. It is a woman in a nightie mumbling to herself as she maniacally shakes a 5-gallon canister of snail bait into her front-yard vegetable garden.
I’ll admit to being the crazy gardener with a nasty snail problem, but it could have been any of us who are both nuts about homegrown tomatoes and inclined to stray outside in pajamas.
While I was growing up, my mom confined her gardening to a tidy planter box of marigolds, so every few days we’d walk down to Mrs. Petitt’s house to buy her gigantic tomatoes. Once we got home, I’d sit on our porch with a tomato in one hand and a saltshaker in the other and eat with sloppy abandon. One would think that once I had my own little plot of land, I would grow my own tomatoes, but it took 18 years to finally get on the bandwagon.
And so it was that I planted my first tomato garden two years ago. I started modestly with two Early Girls and two Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes. The cherries were tasty but so few in number that I ate most of them straight off the vine. The Early Girls, unfortunately, were a disappointment. They were small, pale in color and looked as if they came from the supermarket.
Last year I chose a sunnier spot with better drainage. As luck would have it, the organic tomato vines I bought at an upscale nursery thrived. Soon I had an enviable garden bursting with Brandywines, Hillbillies and the biggest Heirlooms I could ever hope for. My oh-so-sweet red, orange and yellow cherry tomatoes were so plentiful that I could share them without feeling deprived. Ah, sweet success.
Since there’s nothing better than homegrown tomatoes with freshly snipped basil, drizzled balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, I grew basil, too. And then there were the Blue Lake pole beans, eggplant, cucumbers and strawberries. What started as a tomato craving had turned into a full-fledged hobby.
Things are different this year. We’ll soon move out of our house while it is being remodeled, and here’s how crazy I am. I planted a vegetable garden - complete with nine exotic tomato plants, eight lettuces and five basil - at a house that I won’t even be living in, a house in a major construction zone. When I asked our contractor if I could plant the garden in a certain spot, he replied, “Only if you share.”
No problem. Come July, I’ll have tons of cherry tomatoes, and if my contractor is lucky and he stays on schedule, maybe I’ll share some of my prized Heirlooms. Or maybe I’ll use them as bribery to keep him on track.
I’m feeling smug these days because certain friends and neighbors - I won’t name names - haven’t been as successful. They’ve had pitifully sparse plants, blossom end rot, mineral deficiencies, mildew, etc. After bragging that all I did was stick the plants in the ground and water every once in a while, a neighbor who put tremendous effort into her not-so-successful tomato garden shook her head and said, “I killed my tomatoes with kindness while yours thrived from neglect.” Guess I’ve got that magic touch.
But the season is young, and we’ll see how smug I am in October. Gardening, after all, is an odd mix of care and luck. If all goes well, my little beauties will ripen in 57, 75 or 88 days. Can’t wait.
