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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