What my Tomatoes Taught Me

This spring was the first time I planted a garden. Here in the mountains everyone was doing it. Got your plants in yet? Do you think we’ve had the last frost? I bought three types of tomato plants: non-acid, Celebrity, and Horace. I thought it would only take three small sites for my tomatoes. How stupid could I be? I had bought three flats, each containing four tomato plants. Twelve, in all, needed homes in the not-so-great soil around the house.

I felt a burning commitment toward my unborn tomatoes. After all, I adopted them. I had to give them a chance. I used a place where the town had ravaged our yard to repair our water main. From the soil the city tractor had already tilled I rescued many beautiful stones big as a man’s fist – among them the quartz that makes Spruce Pine the Mineral Capital of North Carolina. I fertilized the stone-free earth with bags of soil from Walmart Garden Center, and my fledgling plants soon grew in a proud row in the front yard and in a maverick, second bunch in a sunny spot by the kitchen wall. Here is a picture of some of the tomatoes, taken in late August, lined up on the window sill above the sink.

When I think of the tomatoes, I remember their warm weight in my hand as I carried them in my palm to the cutting board. But I also remember how I had to fight for them all summer. Blight slowly turned their stalks and leaves yellow and dotted with black. Every morning on the way back from the mailbox, I would pause by the tomatoes, tearing off diseased leaves. Some plants were hardy and resisted the blight. Others bowed to it. The tomatoes came anyway; stubborn, resilient, they matured and we enjoyed them for weeks. I wondered at the process that wrought them: something arrived, where there was nothing. All it had taken was time and effort. Patrick, my husband, harvested many green tomatoes and brought them down to our friends Jo and Sharon at the Upper Street Café downtown, where the unripe fruit starred in bacon, lettuce, and fried green tomato sandwich specials. That was summer. Now it’s October.

This morning I took down the metal hoop skirt stands that supported our tomatoes and returned to the soil the stalks and the green tomatoes that are too late arriving. This is the seasonal duty of the gardener, just as was the reaping. I am sad. The recent loss of yet another friend who’s succumbed to cancer haunts me while I work. Today as I send the last of the green tomatoes tumbling into the grass and the earth, the fate of the tomato plants weaves allegories in my head. I think about love affairs and friendships that never ripened, though their transition from flower to fruit was full of the joy of quickening life. I think of dreams and plans that had to be let go because the environment would not support them; because hostile conditions replaced possibility.

Our neighbor, Keith, yanks up old corn stalks and purple morning glories from his side garden, tells me to help myself to the Tommy Toes -- tiny, pungent tomatoes clustered in bright bunches along a snaky, seemingly infinite vine. They are in the process of giving up their lusciousness to the earth. Soon what remains above ground will tumble into the compost barrel Keith keeps behind his house. He shows me how he’ll turn the handle every week or two, so the compost will become rich and mixed. The October sky is bright blue; shards of dried stalks shiffle and scud across rows of soil. Already Keith is talking about next year’s garden, making plans while he hauls and shovels-under.