Year of the tomato squashed
This was supposed to be the year of the tomato.
I’d made plans: the caprese pasta with chopped tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil. The BLT sandwiches. The tomato and cheese sandwiches on the panini grill. Oh, and the best thing of all: the Sunday morning bagel with cream cheese and the perfect slice of tomato sprinkled with salt and pepper. Will I have those things as the summer comes to a close? Maybe, but they won’t be from my garden.
Some evildoer ruined those plans, came slinking or crawling in the night to decimate my crop. That it happened at all is frustrating, but it’s the way they did it.
In June I put in four tomato plants in my raised garden bed. One seemed never to catch on, but as the weeks went by, the other three grew tall and gnarly. I staked them and waited for the first yellow blossoms to appear.
And then came the rain and then the two weeks of heat and drought. Through it all, I tended to the plants like a mom with a newborn. By late July the plants were so heavy with green fruit the vines were dragging. I staked them again, watered, and weeded around them.
“We are about to be inundated,” I told people, offering green tomatoes to any who would like to bread and fry them. All said they’d wait for the red.
There was one tomato that ripened at the beginning of this month. I set it on the counter to get even more red, then sliced it onto a turkey sandwich. It was too small for my Sunday bagel. For that, the slice must match the circumference of the bagel. I’d selected the perfect one for that, and paid it extra attention as it grew.
I’d poke through the gnarly vines and find that one or two were turning pink. Wanting them to ripen in the sun, I left them there. Last week, I counted. There were 28 green tomatoes, mostly beefsteaks but a few smaller ones.
Turns out I was counting unhatched chickens. The next day I found a semi-ripe tomato on the ground. Something had pulled it from the vine, taken a single bite and dropped it. Raccoon, I thought, because the precision of the bite and the discard would have required manual dexterity. I tossed the wasted tomato over the hill and cursed the existence of rodents.
But things got worse. The next day I woke to find the vines had been plundered. All the fruit was gone, as if picked by a farmhand. The plants were intact. Had the raccoon returned with his family to steal the rest of my crop? Had a groundhog found my treasure? Or a deer? Whoever the jerk that stole my crop – they took it all. I found no half-eaten tomatoes on the ground, so at least they didn’t waste any.
I could have done more to protect the plants, maybe animal-proof cages. But the beds were raised from the ground, and I planted some lavender as a deterrent. But those measures failed.
The local farm markets will have tomatoes starting this week, and I’ll go and buy some, selecting the perfect sizes and shapes for my Sunday bagel and the other treats. I’ll enjoy all of it. But there’s something extra tasty about a tomato that I grew myself. Not this year. Eventually I’ll go out there and pull out the sad, empty plants.