Living With Gramps - Growing Tomatoes

It was time to plant tomatoes! I was content buying tomatoes from the store year-round, but my grandfather insisted he would only eat tomatoes from his own backyard, picked when perfectly ripe and not a minute before. “There’s nothing better on a hot summer’s day than biting into a juicy tomatoe straight from the garden.” It was a big deal to him. He went on and on about how wonderful backyard tomatoes were and how awful store tomatoes were as if the grocer had committed some unpardonable sin. My aunt compared store tomatoes to baseballs.

The first step was to clear a space for them. No mention was made of where the hole was to be dug except that it would be where the old garden was. One day, when I had time, I got to work overturning chunks of soil held together by clover and other weeds until I had a big enough space. Wire structures were placed to support the plants and markers were left to let our mower know not to run them over (When I first moved in, the neighbor was still mowing our lawn).

The next step was to buy the plants. We went to a nearby farm/nursery that sells probably hundreds of varieties of plants – edible and ornamental – as well as garden décor and more. Instead of running in and out, my grandfather insisted on looking around and asking me a trillion questions about each plant. Eventually, his legs got tired and we almost didn’t make it back to the car. We bought four jetstar tomatoe plants, which was the same kind he used to get in the past. Finally home, I planted the tomatoes in the dirt and gave them their first watering.

A couple days later, my grandfather went out to see my work. “Why did you plant them here? They were always grown over there before.”

“You never told me where to put them or that it mattered,” I said.

“You should have asked me,” he said.

At least the hard part was over. There was enough rain that summer that I never had to water. Someone or something nibbled off two of the leaves the first week, which was concerning since the plants were still so small, but whoever it was learned their lesson and never did it again. Tomatoe leaves are poisonous. I inquired about fencing, but my grandfather said that he had never used fencing and had never had trouble with animals – unless it was birds stealing his blueberries.

Soon enough, small yellow flowers showed. These were followed by small green fruit that swelled before turning red. Picking the first one to turn red, I brought it inside to ask if it was alright or whether I should wait longer next time (I did not want to leave them too long while they rotted on the vine). Dismissing all my reasoning and prudence, my grandfather told me it clearly wasn’t ready since the skin near the stem was still tinged yellow, the fruit was too firm for him, and I clearly didn’t know anything about gardening.

I waited for the others, but there were problems. The fruits kept rotting before they were even half-ripe. Some fell off onto the dirt and rotted there. A few had huge bites taken out of them. Our neighbor down the street told me she was having the same problem and that it was a bad year for tomatoes everywhere. “Too much rain,” she said. By the time autumn hit, we had only eaten ten percent of the fruit that grew, throwing away the other ninety percent. However, this was just barely enough for the two of us. I suspect that in a normal year, four plants could serve a whole family.

While I put mine in sandwiches, my grandfather ate his slices at dinner with sugar sprinkled on them. This had long been a tradition on my mother’s side of the family. Tomatoes and lettuce were served with sugar. I asked my grandfather how it started. Did he invent it? Did he learn from his parents? Did grandma introduce it from her side of the family? He did not remember. “I don’t know; we just always did it, I guess.”

We had lettuce, too, that year. Three plants popped up among the tomatoes. With the clover out of the way, it thrived. I had to constantly weed the clover out. One of the lettuce plants then went to seed, putting up a stem taller than the tomatoe plants.

The next year, we left the tomatoe plant in the pot and put it on the porch. We had all the same troubles – maybe even worse. I’m a better writer than I am a gardener. I couldn’t even keep the rhubarb alive.