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Plants

LITTLE WONDER

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Cherry tomatoes boast mellifluous names such as camp joy, Whippersnapper, Chello Yellow and Golden Pearl. They grow like opportunistic weeds strung out on nitrogen. And they require no peeling or cooking to go from garden trug to dinner plate. So why isn’t everybody with a patch of tilled ground out there harvesting them?

I can answer that. All too often, the cherry tomato is mistakenly dismissed as mere garnish, a pedestrian hair bow without which the pretty head of lettuce would still elicit a second look of admiration. And that’s if you use the tomato whole. Slice a Sweet 100 in half, and you really short-circuit its brief, useful life. This little fruit may catch the gleam off your kitchen light fixture like a shiny patent-leather handbag, but once you get too close, the weakness of its flesh (a poor excuse, quite frankly, for flesh at all) is revealed in that amniotic core of seeds, shimmering with viscous opaque gel.

Half a cherry tomato is never better than none, and if you’re looking for something to perk up a tuna sandwich, well, forget it. In fact, forget gastronomic performance art with cherry tomatoes altogether. Gazpacho? Don’t make me laugh. Sun-dried tomatoes? Don’t even bother. Salad? Fine, as long as the Yellow Pears are never refrigerated.

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It was only when I finally grew cherry tomatoes myself that I came to appreciate their charm. For one thing, they want to live. You can’t help but admire their tenacity, springing out from a manure pile or poking up from the compost heap. Like weeds, they have a way of laughing at death. In fact, today’s cherry tomatoes are descended from wild plants that orginated in South America, and they retain the hardiness of their ancestors.

The first time I grew them, it was accidental; I’d recently moved into a place with 15 gone-to-seed raised vegetable beds in the yard and had only the faintest notion of how to fill them. My naivete was stunning: I didn’t know how to turn a seedling upside down to free it from the plastic nursery pot, and I painstakingly transplanted an entire bed full of scarlet-rooted weeds, convinced they would produced red-skinned potatoes.

My new neighbor, a brilliant forensic psychologist in her late 60s who gardens as naturally as she breathes, beckoned me over one morning and pointed to an area lined with “volunteer” tomato seedlings sprung from the previous year’s dropped seeds. To my unpracticed eye, they could have been dandelions. “You should take some,” she instructed me and handed me fistfuls of plants, wrapped in a paper towel.

At home, I sat in the grass, gingerly untangling dozens of fragile young stems. They were as limp as minnows and thirsty. I planted six of them in my beds, along with Burpee Early Girls that I’d bought at the nursery. They laid right down and appeared to die. Serves them right, scrawny things, I thought.

Six weeks later, all of my neighbor’s plants were heavy with fruit. Little fruit. Cherry tomatoes. Not only that, but what remained of the half-ton of aged steer manure that I’d had delivered by an ancient farmer in a Dust Bowl pickup truck, which he’d emptied unceremoniously in the center of the side yard, sprouted cherry tomato plants dangling with fruit. Day after day, I collected tomatoes in baskets, where they created an instant still life. As they rotted, I pitched them back into the compost heap, marveling at the symmetry of nature. If I’d only known, I could have pulled out whole plants and hung them upside down in a well-ventilated spot until the fruits dried--not to desiccation but just to the point that emphasized their sweet succulence.

Then my stepson remarked idly that his mother loved cherry tomatoes. That weekend, I sent him home with a grocery bag full of them. The following weekend, when my husband’s ex-wife dropped Matthew off, she rolled down the car window and handed me two warm baguettes from the local bakery.

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“Thank you for the delicious cherry tomatoes,” she said shyly. “This bread is for you because I’m not talented with growing things like you are.” Since that summer, I’ve studied a lot of gardening books and corrected most of my early mistakes. I’ve also gotten quite a kick out of starting different cherry tomato varieties from seed for her delectation because the most important thing I learned about growing them is the pleasure of giving them all away.

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