From today’s New York Times:

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I am finally beginning to understand tomatoes. At least that’s how it feels this year. I’ve tried growing them in page-wire cages and in stiff wire cones. One year I simply gave up and let the plants flop along the ground, the way they seem to want to do. The past few years I’ve grown them on seven-foot stakes, a single stalk working its way upward. I’ve skipped most of the modern tomato technologies: red plastic mulch and water-filled girdles that keep young plants from freezing. I don’t even try to raise the seedlings myself. A friend raises them for me — heirlooms mostly. I put them in the ground around Memorial Day and wait.

My tomato skills are these. I am a ruthless pincher. Off go the suckers — sprouting in the joint between branch and stem — and off goes any branch that looks as if it’s going into business for itself. Last week, several of the plants topped out their poles, and I pinched back the growing tips as if to say: “Vegetation is over. Time to ripen.” I wash my hands and the water is green.

My other skill is tying up tomatoes. A couple of years ago I found the knot I needed — a loose, open overhand knot around the stem and then a square knot around the stake, the whole thing shaped like an 8. I use baling twine, of which we have an infinite supply, cut into forearm lengths.

As skills go in this complicated world, these are as simple as they come. And yet I can’t explain how gratifying they are, how much pleasure it gives me to examine each stem for suckers, to know that I’ve really looked those tomatoes over. As I tie up the stalks, I think about the storms that blow through this time of year — bruising rain, sudden downdrafts — and it’s good to know that the tomatoes, at least, are safely moored. I know there’s a harvest somewhere in my calculations. I see that other people’s vines have ripe tomatoes on them. But earliness isn’t everything.

I wish I could say that I turn from the tomatoes to the squash and the sweet corn and the turnips and the beans. But it hasn’t been that kind of year. Beyond the tomato patch is a forest of weeds, apart from a few sad rows of radishes and some patches of mesclun. I have a long list of excuses: caterpillars in May and June, the steady rain, a surprising reinforcement of woodchucks. Once again, this fall, I will reorganize, put up a stout wire fence, and lay out next spring in advance.

But the truth is that I would rather grow tomatoes than anything else. Pathogens may spring from the soil in a hard rain onto the lower leaves, corrupting them, but the tomato stalk pushes upward, rampant, always probing outward, feeling its way, almost disregarding the fruit it was meant to bear.

Categories: gardening wisdom
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Sunday was a gorgeous day to be out in the garden, and I was for several hours in the afternoon. Yesterday wasn’t bad, either. This week we’re looking at another mini-heatwave, though, so I doubt I’ll be able to get out too much before the weekend.

Tonight is National Night Out, apparently, so there’s been some discussion of gardeners bringing candles out to the gardens and lighting them up, and hanging out in them until nine. All I’ve got to say is, if you’re gonna bring candles, make sure they’re citronella. I was there around six last night, when my garden’s shaded, and the mosquitoes were having their own little night out. And dinner was on me. Literally.

So anyway…

Yesterday there was this fellow in the fens cruising. Well, there were a few, as always, but this one was cruising me. Little old ME! Imagine! I felt like a sweepstakes winner!

Truth is I was just minding my own business, dropped in on my way home from “work,” and really wasn’t looking for “action.”

Day-cruising in the Fenway is generally kept to the designated cruising circuit, which consisits of certain paths, nooks and crannies among the phragmites. At least before dark, and until they hook up. I think this is a good arrangement. I mean, I accept the Fens as a multipurpose park, and I certainly don’t object to a little al fresco amore on occasion.

So this fellow was hanging out obviously looking for a little afternoon delight. I went to get a wheelbarrow and saw him. He was strutting around very determinedly, shirtless, and was one of these guys, probably in his mid-forties, who’s totally ravaged from the neck up, but with the athletic physique of a twenty-something.

He stalked around (and around and around), and finally zeroed in on my garden. I was chatting with Tony when he passed by the second time, and on his third pass he finally stopped.

He leaned on the fence, and smiled a sad, ravaged smile, and said, “Hey!”

We were like, “how’s it going?”

He was like, “I want some seeds.”

I said, “what kind of seeds are you looking for?”

He was like, “Your seeds, man!”

“Mmm, nice.”

He’s like, “You gotta gimme credit for that line, man. It took me, like, ten minutes to think of it.”

Tony and I knodded in appreciation. And I rushed right over and poked my thingy through the chain-link fence, and a good time was had by all.

No. Sad to say, the mystery was gone.

You know, cruising’s a delicate balance. He was obviously horny and frustrated and thought he’d just cut to the chase. But, strange as it may seem, this is a highly ritualized exercise. And especially day-cruising takes honed instincts, charm, and tact. At night, if you’re in a cruising spot, you don’t need the charm or the tact. But in the daytime, you may be in cruise-world, but once you diverge from the path, you’re out in the real world.

I mean, I was in my garden pulling weeds chatting with my neighbor. You know? In the real world we don’t just go up to people and solicit them. It’s not like asking the time. “Excuse me, may I blow you?” “How ya doing? Would you mind poking me in the bushes over there?” That’s not how day-time society works. Sorry. If you want to cruise in the daylight of the real world, it’s a different set of rules. It takes skills, people.

Heaven forbid anyone reading this were to think I’m a prude. Far from it. We live in a slut society–not just sex sluts, but corporate sluts, drug sluts, sports sluts. Far be it from me to suggest we should hide our sluttiness under a bushel basket, or whatever. Slut it up, by all means. But even sluts go about things a certain way. That’s all I’m saying.

Categories: Urban Gardening Strategies
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