The Harvest
Eileene is watching old episodes of Good Eats, a cooking show we both enjoy. Eileene likes the humor, such as it is; I like the way Alton Brown stops to show you what food looks like when it’s gone wrong. Television cooks usually just show you the film where everything goes just right. It helps a lot more to have an instructor say things like, “If it’s boiling this hard, the temperature is too high,” and, “This is what happens to noodles that aren’t placed in enough water.”
I bring this up because one of these backlog episodes is on tomatoes, and how fresh, garden tomatoes are the culinary pinnacle of summer. Which is ironic, as I just brought in our last batch of home-grown a week ago.
This has been my third attempt at growing my own tomatoes, and my track record to date has been quite poor, even for someone who started knowing zilch about gardening. The first year, I decided up front that nothing good would come of the attempt: whatever dangers lurk for an ignorant gardener, I would find them, probably several at once, and the plants would die. Then I could apply all that hands-on training to another crop. The plan worked; I grew no tomatoes. I started too late, mistaking the date for transplanting baby tomato plants for the date to plant seeds. I planted them too close together – not my fault, since the seed envelope had a typo. The plants should be about 2’ apart; mine were spaced at 2”.
The second year went much better, in the sense of actually getting tomatoes out of the deal. The plants got off to a strong start, though three suddenly toppled, as though lopped off by an errant golf club. Dad explained that it was probably the work of “cut worms.” I’d never heard of these devils before, but these beetle larvae lurk just below the surface, and climb out to eat about one eighth of an inch of plant, right at the ground level. I had five surviving plants, and they weren’t heavy producers, but I had several promising fruits…until some neighborhood animal sensed I was ready to pick them, and gnawed through them all. Ultimately, I got only two tomatoes, one the size of a tennis ball, the other the size of a golf ball. They were mighty tasty. Worth the effort? I dunno.
The third year went better still. The soil sifted for larvae, and the patch caged by chicken wire, the seedlings raised in our sun room, the plants practically exploded out of the ground. Though they were slow to blossom, we eventually got enough flowers to promise great results.
Then the tomatoes started to rot, somewhere around the pink stage when they just start to ripen and the green pigments vanish, but the red ones have yet to arrive. I don’t know why. We only got five good, red tomatoes this summer.
And then, as though in a desperate attempt to reproduce in the face of 50ºF temperatures, the plants began popping out tomatoes like crazy somewhere around the end of September. We’ve got two bags of the things on the dining table, refusing to ripen. Alton Brown says a banana produces plenty of some gas that acts as a ripening agent, so one bag has a banana in it. The other is our control case for the experiment. Neither bag has shown any real sign of ripening, though the banana was certainly encouraged by the tomatoes.
So that’s the lesson for today: if you have any bananas that need speed ripening, put them in a brown paper bag in a sunny location with some green tomatoes. Don’t ask me why it works that way; I can’t even grow tomato plants properly.