STYLE: GARDENING : A Time to Grow

“ I suppose in most women the creative instinct displays itself in the planning and decoration of a house. We are not great musicians--there is no female Bach or Beethoven--nor painters--there is no Velasquez in petticoats. “ -- British author Esther Meynell

I ONCE BELIEVED THAT THE SWEETEST WORDS IN ENGLISH WERE “THE TIDE IS OUT”--THAT’S WHEN THE secret world of swirling seaweeds and wavering anemones is revealed to human eyes--but now I think that vine-ripened tomatoes comes close, maybe even surpasses them. There’s nothing like that explosion of tomato flavor in the mouth, especially after the long drought of winter and spring, when the only fresh tomatoes available are perfectly formed impostors so heartbreakingly anemic that you wonder if they were ever attached to a vine or whether they didn’t plop out of a vending machine instead.

I read in the paper recently that breeders are putting the flavor back into store-bought tomatoes: Sure, I said, and they’re funneling the toothpaste back into the tube, too. In the meantime, I refuse to buy tomatoes at the supermarket, and from September to May, my green salads are quite literally that--green--as innocent of tomatoes as Europe before Cortez. It’s a moral stance as well as a culinary one. I may have to put up with quarters filled with copper and orange juice made from concentrate, but I draw the line at aluminum baseball bats and celluloid tomatoes. Where’s the authenticity in a life based upon substitutes?

My tomato season begins on New Year’s Day, when I plant several seeds in each of six or seven milk cartons. Every year, the temptation to plant all the seeds in the package is nearly insurmountable. In the middle of winter, the prospect of 40 or 50 tomato vines seems not daunting but exhilarating, and someday, if I ever have enough garden space, I may succumb. By the end of February, the seedlings are strong enough to set in the ground, which I do, even though the danger of frost won’t be over for two more weeks. I follow the weather reports, and if cold nights threaten, I cover the plants with heavy paper bags.

An early start is important in Arizona because our climate is marginal for tomato growing. The flowers won’t set fruit when temperatures are below 55 degrees or above 100, and since March nights are generally chilly and June days are invariably hot, we have only a small window of opportunity for tomato set. When an unusually cool spring combines with an extraordinarily hot summer, this window narrows to a slit.

IN MY GARDEN, FRUIT SET USUALLY BEGINS BY THE END OF MARCH. UNTIL THEN, FLOWERS OPEN, WAIT, then fall barren to the ground, a source of anxiety with June just around the corner. Gardening books sometimes suggest that you can improve fruit set by shaking the flower stalks or tapping them sharply with a pencil. Certainly this won’t harm the plants, but I think the benefits are mostly psychological.

If you look at a tomato flower under a hand lens, you’ll see that the five anthers are arranged in a ring, creating a cylinder of empty space where pollen collects. In elongating through this mass of pollen, the pistil becomes pollinated, and if all goes well, the fertilized ovary develops into a fruit. This is self-fertilization, a process that requires no intermediaries--no bees, no butterflies, no anxious gardeners equipped with pencils. All it takes is reasonably warm temperatures and an adequate supply of mature leaves, which provide nutrient materials. (Sugars are the foremost of these, but laboratory scientists have been able to ripen tomatoes in petri dishes by injecting the immature fruits with any number of chemical compounds, including amino acids, ascorbic acid and, rather perversely, tomato juice.)

No larger than glass pinheads at first, the fruits swell rapidly, and by the end of April, they are visibly ripening, losing that raw green color and beginning to blush pale orange from the bottom up. As more and more leaves are produced, the pace of fruit set increases, and the burden of fruits pulls the branches down. The plants themselves, flourishing and undisciplined, sprawl across the ground, badly needing to be staked. Their leaves and branches are clammy to the touch, leaving an impression of dampness, but oddly there’s never any moisture to brush away.

For tomatoes set out in late February, the moment of perfect ripeness comes sometime in May--never early enough. When ripe, a tomato is bright red from top to bottom. Vermilion will not do; they must be red to be fully sweet. My six tomato vines produce only one or two ripe tomatoes at first. These are precious objects, and I prepare them simply. Later in the season, when tomatoes are abundant, I fix spaghetti sauce or cheese and tomato pie.

But for now, I slice the tomatoes, drizzle them with olive oil and seasoned rice vinegar and sprinkle fresh chopped basil, salt and pepper on top. This is a dish to be eaten at room temperature since chilling masks its sweetness. In a week or two, I will have enough tomatoes for gazpacho, a cold soup involving chopped tomatoes, cucumbers and parsley in a broth of tomato and V-8 juices. A soupcon of red wine vinegar and generous dashes of salt and pepper are the only seasonings I use. Some cooks add bread crumbs and olive oil, but I prefer generous amounts of tomato as the thickener.

During June and July, the wealth of tomatoes set in May continues to ripen at a steady pace, providing ample material for more gazpacho, cheese and tomato pie, stuffed tomatoes, garden tomato sauce, bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, tomato salads, tomato soup (which is nothing like the canned product) and on and on. The cheese and tomato pie is the best of the lot, equally delicious hot or cold and well worth the effort required. A homemade pie crust, lightly baked, is the base. Into this I spoon three diced onions that have been sauteed in liberal amounts of butter. A layer of tomato sauce is next, and this must be homemade, too, from three pounds of tomatoes lovingly peeled and seeded then cooked with a sauteed onion, minced garlic, fresh chopped basil and salt and pepper until quite thick, nearly thick enough to burn onto the saucepan. Finally, I hide the tomato sauce under thinly sliced mozzarella and make a decoration of sliced black olives on top before I bake the pie in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes.

The first summer I grew tomatoes, I regarded them as treasures to be hoarded for special recipes only and parceled out judiciously to the very best of friends. Perhaps in reaction, I determined that I would have a tomato deluge the following summer. I succeeded too well. Coming back mid-June from a two-week vacation, I found 10 tomatoes in the refrigerator, left there by my daughter, who had watered the garden in my absence. This seemed a reasonable harvest until I stepped out the back door and discovered that my tomato vines were collapsing under ripe fruit. Bringing tomatoes indoors a dozen at a time, it took an hour to pick them all. When I finished, the entire surface of the kitchen table was hidden by tomatoes, 45 pounds altogether. I prided myself that, as organic tomatoes, they were worth $180 at a local market. For once in my life, I had enough tomatoes to fill the big wicker laundry basket, enough to make a gallon of pizza sauce, enough to share with even casual acquaintances. Enough, too, to keep me in the kitchen for several days or more. Too late, I remembered the words of Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Undoubtedly he had a garden in mind.

GARDENING MAKES HOMEBODIES OF US ALL, AND DURING THE SUMMER OF THE TOMATOES I BECAME, TO MY dismay, more firmly tied to my kitchen than a cat to its tail. This was the summer of the cucumbers, too, so the pressure of produce from the garden was like the surge of unruly fans at a rock concert, and I was a lone Pinkerton guard trying to hold them back. Forty-five pounds of tomatoes! How could I possibly use them all before they spoiled? I rifled my cookbooks for tomato recipes--scalloped tomatoes, baked tomatoes, pickled tomatoes, Cuban tomatoes, tomato risotto, fried green tomatoes--and, hoping that tomato cake couldn’t be as bad as it sounded, discovered that it could. As I stood at the sink, slipping skins off tomatoes, then scooping out their insides, I was struck by the thought that although I refused to iron clothes, I was perfectly willing to peel and seed tomatoes. Equally amazing was the fact that I, who had never canned so much as a peach, had repaired to the hardware store, where I had bought every conceivable canning accessory: jelly jars, pint jars, jar lids, a jar rack, a jar lifter, a jar wrench and, most important of all, a huge enamel pot called a hot-water canner, a kettle so big that it wouldn’t fit in any cupboard. As it turned out, this didn’t matter because it was in use every day for most of the summer.

It didn’t rest and neither did I. Daily I stood in the kitchen, seeding tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, chopping onions, dicing green peppers, salting them down, boiling them up, spooning them into the sterile jars that waited like baby birds, mouths gaping, to be filled. Daily the house was redolent of onion and spices, and my mind was redolent with memories of my mother and grandmother bottling peaches and pears. Daily the hot-water canner steamed on the stove top, lid rattling and jars clanking, as noisy as a freight train. Usually, all four stove burners were going simultaneously: one for the canner, another for sterilizing the lids and metal bands, a third for sterilizing jars and a fourth for cooking the chili sauce or pickle brine. I savored the irony of the gardener’s life: In winter, when canning would be a cozy operation, filling the chilly kitchen with welcome warmth, the garden produces naught, but in summer, when every extra degree of heat adds to the day’s burdens, the garden overflows.

As my days became a constant round of slicing and dicing, brining and whining, I complained that there must be better things to do with my time. There were books to read, journals to fill, woodwork to paint, mountains to climb, but I could do none of that, awash as I was in a sea of tomatoes and cucumbers, going down for the third time. I told family and friends that I was “sinking into domesticity,” not certain if I was joking or not, half-afraid that I would sink out of sight.

That was my deepest fear: drowning in that all-too-tempting, all-too-natural, all-too-easy role. Spending my days in the kitchen and my evenings poring over cookbooks, I was catapulted backward in time to the beginning of my first marriage 20 years before, when a really good recipe for ground beef was more precious than gold fillings and making a perfect souffle seemed more important than achieving peace in our time. In those days, I fully agreed with Esther Meynell that “women express themselves in the colour of their curtains, the placing of a table or a bowl of flowers.” Scrubbing, dusting, sewing, baking, I was the perfect little wife in her perfect little life. My then-father-in-law congratulated my husband on the fact that I had taken to homemaking like a duck to water. He meant it as a compliment. Even more amazing, I regarded it as one.

Sometimes I want to shake her by the shoulders, that young wife so eager to please, so devoted to her kitchen and her husband, but I should be kinder. That was all she had. Only when chopping fresh herbs, flouring a chicken breast, kneading dough, dicing onions, preparing a roux, did she feel any confidence in herself or her abilities. Only when praised for the meal on the table did she feel a sense of worth. Asked to say one positive thing about herself, it was always “I’m a good cook.”

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT EVENTUALLY CAME ALONG AND TAUGHT ME TO QUESTION ALL THE COMPLIMENTS and the cooking, the perfection and the tininess of the goals that made perfection possible. Look, it said, there are other, more interesting lives you can lead. It suggested that, contrary to Meynell, perhaps there could be (or already had been!) a female Bach of Beethoven, a Velasquez in petticoats. Once stated clearly and plainly, these truths seemed self-evident. So why, I wondered now, was I spending every free moment in the kitchen? I hadn’t subscribed to Ms. magazine for 10 years only to end up sweating over kettles of boiling water. Surely there was something more important to do than drag a hose around the yard and pack tomatoes into jars.

About that time, I found a bird’s nest on the driveway. Gusty winds had evidently knocked it out of the palm tree. The nest had not been used yet--there were no droppings inside nor any broken eggs on the ground. It was bowl-shaped, about the size of a bread-and-butter plate, with an inner hollow not much wider than a teacup. The outer part was a thick swirl of green weeds--the upper stems of pepper grass, shepherd’s purse and London rocket--roughly twined together. Inside this was a thick layer of woolly plant material--probably cudweed--again, the upper stems only. Very fine grass fibers pressed flat made a soft lining, and the innermost layer of all, only partly completed, was thistledown.

Out of curiosity, I showed it to my cat. She recognized it as something more than a clump of weeds and tugged and worried the outer layer with her teeth until I took the nest away. I couldn’t let her destroy it because suddenly I, too, recognized it as something more. Standing there in the driveway with a partly finished bird’s nest in my hand, I understood that we humans are animals and the need for a home is built into our psyches.

Convinced that nothing of value could come out of the kitchen, I had for some years turned my back on all the womanly tasks I’d learned and loved as a teen-ager--sewing, decorating, cooking--and with what results? The need to eat didn’t go away simply because I decided I didn’t like to cook. The need for a place to live didn’t disappear just because I wouldn’t spend time making curtains and dusting knickknacks. The problem is achieving a balance.

I learned a lot that summer of the tomatoes. I learned that I never want to grow so many tomatoes again. I learned that I wouldn’t drown in domesticity; I would float. I learned that homemaking is literally the creation of a home with all that implies about renewal and comfort and protection. And I learned that feminists need homes, too.