Growing Her Way
When I was a struggling free-lance writer living in New York, I managed to buy four tomato plants and a couple of sacks of dirt at a TriBeCa nursery. The nursery was across the street from a topless bar some painter has since made famous. I remember the bar because it had a sign out front that said “Free Hot Dogs Today,” which I always read as a plea for their release. I also recall thinking that it was strange having to buy dirt in Manhattan. Growing tomatoes there helped cultivate my sense of irony.
The poet and essayist John Daniel calls tomatoes the red suns of August, an edible poem and vital part of the natural year. The problem, as we all know, is that if you are to taste the warmth of sun turned to firm, juicy flesh, you have to grow them yourself.
I’ve always grown tomatoes. Or at least tried.
In New York, I planted the tender seedlings on the fire escape of my loft in empty industrial containers scrounged from Canal Street. By June, the landing looked like a Vietnamese jungle. Between phone calls to people who didn’t want to talk to me for an article ripe with potential lawsuits, I could be found outside my desk window, hand-pollinating pale yellow blossoms with an artist’s paintbrush. I’d yet to see a bee on the big island and didn’t want to take any chances.
Two jewels eventually emerged, jade green swelling to red. Harvest day brought out the Instamatic.
I cupped the first ripe tomato in my hand and tilted it toward the lens. The scarlet fruit rolled forward over my fingertips, touched the top step and bounced down the metal stairs. It didn’t stop until it hit the landing below with a sickening thud that made me think of a clown falling from a high-wire to pavement. I retrieved the smashed tomato, tucked its shredded skin back into a semblance of round and, with it held high, smiled squinty-eyed pretty for the camera.
I knew that if I could grow tomatoes there, I could grow them anywhere.
The authorities took a dimmer view. When the loft below us caught fire, I was slapped with a $150 citation for blocking the fire escape with plants. My ticketed tomatoes, more expensive per ounce than hand-massaged Japanese beef, marked the beginning of the end of my New York sojourn.
I moved back to my native California, where bees abounded and I could concentrate on my real job. Over my years in journalism, I’ve continued to collect tomato-growing tips. One winter, Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, let me watch as he shoveled steaming cow manure from his Nashville barn onto his tomato bed in anticipation of spring. For those of us who don’t have a barn, composted steer manure purchased by the plastic bagfuls will do.
One tomato maniac who claimed to know the two secrets to growing the world’s largest tomatoes, suggested tying the plants to horizontal boards for a few weeks before setting them outdoors. This would force them to grow upward, toward the light, producing stronger, superior plants. You were supposed to send him money for the other secret, but I found the whole idea just too kinky to consider.
Despite my seasons at the trowel, size has yet to become an issue. I’m still dreaming of the day I can complain about having too many tomatoes.
This year was the first in which I had a full-sun patch of garden to offer the precious vines. In January, I turned the rock-strewn clay with a pick axe before amending it with manure. In March, I set my alarm early one morning to be among the first arrivals for the “Tomatomania!” sale at a cutting-edge nursery in Pasadena. When the gates opened at 8 a.m., my husband and I couldn’t believe we were the only ones there. This is the community, after all, in which the Huntington Botanical Gardens’ annual plant sale is treated like the Oklahoma land rush.
My disbelief quickly gave way to ecstasy. I became woozy as I considered the dazzling variety of plants the nursery had grown from heirloom seeds. This was my chance to go beyond Big Boys and Early Girls and give full expression to my own tomato fever. I took German Striped (a taste like peaches!), Big Rainbow, Prudence Purple, White Wonder, Red and Gold Currants. I tossed in a San Marzano, too, because I fancied there’d be enough for sauce. Eight plants in all, shoehorned into a space two-thirds the size of a door. By July, I could be found in the tomato patch’s embrace, a tangle of nubbed vines and moist leaves smelling of an effortless, seminal green. Now I move through them with the cautious delicacy of a tai chi master, harvesting my rewards.
Given Southern California’s climate, we hope to be eating bruschetta and fresh pomodoro sauce well into the New Year.
I’m not complaining. Yet. No, I’m looking forward to next spring. Maybe I’ll even get kinky and try out a couple of boards.
