Picking that first tomato of the season was a delight to the senses, but harvest quickly transformed into a hectic marathon
Every summer, garden history repeated itself.
According to the long-range forecast, we were facing a prolonged drought cycle, but my husband, Leo, was raring to plant the garden before the snow melted. The only moisture I could foresee was the wet blanket I kept throwing on his plans.
He’d ask how many tomatoes he should start, and I’d say something like, it will not rain anyhow so why go to all the work?
He’d ask how I knew that it wouldn’t rain? I’d tell him because that’s what the long-range forecast was telling us.
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I was not just trying to curtail his enthusiasm for gardening, although I admit that entered into it. But also, the bigger the garden, the more canning and freezing and pickling awaited me.
When the weather got hot and humid, I resented being a slave to a patch of cucumbers that huddled there in the shade yelling, “pickle me, pickle me.” And then, when I would come with my pail, they tested my patience by playing hide and seek under the leaves.
But aside from my annual case of hot weather lethargy, I really did not expect to see sufficient rain.
I would be so surprised the first time I heard raindrops peppering down on the roof in the middle of the night I’d get up to see what was going on. There was a downspout beside our bedroom window and when the clouds really let loose, it was like trying to sleep on the brink of Niagara Falls.
Occasionally, it even interrupted Leo’s snoring. Over the noise of the deluge, he mumbled something about buying more tomato seeds and then rolled over and went back to sleep.
But not for long.
Come morning, he would be out getting the tiller tuned up, the twine untangled and the tomato plants started on the windowsill.
But it probably won’t rain again until November, I would chide.
But it did, and soon we had a jungle out there. The tomcat thought he had died and gone to heaven because he could successfully ambush his prey from the depths of the pea patch.
Leo warned me that if I didn’t get that old bird bagger out of the vines, there would be nothing left with feathers on it come fall.
Given the tomcat’s lethargy in hot weather, I doubted there would be fewer birds, but I could guarantee there would be more tomatoes than ever because the forecasters had been wrong again.
What started out as a trickle of tomatoes ended up as a landslide.
Back in spring, I began to look forward to watching them. I confess I could hardly wait for that first little tomato to ripen. Soon there was another, and another. Before long, things escalated so fast, the colour of the garden plot rapidly changed from green to red.
Once they were picked, I noticed that some ripened much faster than others. Like women who dye their hair, I guess they just spontaneously decide to change colour overnight, which was always a surprise.
Or maybe they were engaged in the Great Tomato Marathon. Being snapped from the stem must sound just like a starter gun to some tomatoes, and it triggers the ripening process.
The only problem was that the older I got, the faster those tomatoes crossed the finish line. Catching them at the peak of their perfection kept us on the run, which was probably a good thing. We seniors are constantly being told by the media that if we hang around too long without being used, we get old and soft, like tomatoes.
For that reason, about every second day, I suggested to Leo that he go down to the basement and sort vegetables. I figure there was no use letting him get old and soft, too. He invariably came up the stairs toting a bowl full of ripe tomatoes.
After a few weeks, I lost my appetite for toasted tomato sandwiches on homemade bread, so it was time to haul out the jars and start preserving. I doubt there has ever been a more versatile vegetable (or is it a fruit?) than a tomato.
Green, ripe, fresh, frozen, canned, dried, sliced, squeezed — take your pick. Every fall there were jars and jars of tomato juice lining the shelves in our basement storage room, plus a good supply of soup base and spaghetti sauce into which I had deviously slipped in surplus carrots and onions and celery.
I always had to resist tossing in a few green peppers, which Leo absolutely detested. Had he ever detected so much as a hint of their presence in anything made with tomatoes, he might never again have helped me eat my way out from under the landslide of tomatoes that always seemed to inundate the premises this time of year.
