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THE TOMATO AND ME Although I’ve grown tomatoes and more just about every year since we moved into our house in 1990, I still feel like a neophyte. I definitely don’t get it right every year. As in all things garden-related, though, it’s partly the challenge of getting more right, this year, that keeps me doing it. Tomatoes are not particularly fussy seedlings, but they do need space and light; my house luckily affords both. But the year I really got going was when my husband Frank built me what’s become my favorite piece of furniture—a sturdy, three-tiered, slatted seed-starting shelf unit with places to hang fluorescent shop tubes at adjustable heights. Of course, with 72 seedlings to up-pot in several weeks, we will have outgrown that space by the end of April. Never mind, there’s always the windowsills and kitchen table for a month or so. I fell in love with my Italian father-in-law when I visited his Long Island home for the first time and saw about 80 tomato seedlings started in various pots, cans, and milk jugs. He actually planted about that many in his back yard every year until recently. He has always gardened organically and cared for his soil in a practical, old-world way. (Frank has some funny stories about scrounging grocery stores for boxes of over-the-hill produce that got worked into the garden soil—one year a bunch of day-old cream pies even got dug under in the fall; cream pies apparently do not compost well) We can still talk about tomato varieties and gardening techniques ad nauseum, and when I visit him, I have to walk through his vegetable plot to feel that gorgeous deep loam under my feet. I pore through seed catalogs every winter, mainly interested in tomatoes that might do well here in Santa Fe. I love the idea of heirlooms and big juicy beefsteaks but have not had good results with either. The heirlooms are nearly always puny plants that bear less well, and they can be more vulnerable to plant diseases. I grew up eating huge beefsteaks from my mother’s rampant Midwestern vegetable garden (my sisters and I swear she had imported radioactive soil some time when we were children), but they never seem to do well at this altitude with its cool summer nights and lean soils. So I’m a bit embarrassed to admit to the Botanical Gardens readers that I mostly grow hybrids, and they mostly do well. I grow assorted varieties, always including my favorite “Sweet Tangerine” and at least a couple different cherry types—eating them right in the garden is my husband’s wage for harvesting the rest through August and September. I add homemade compost to the beds every spring, and otherwise garden organically, so I have few bug problems. Our pests tend to be much larger. Every year I lose more and more tomatoes to the various Tesuque rodentia and, no doubt, to a few birds. You can fence the rabbits out to an extent, but there is not much to do about mice and squirrels that have developed a taste for tomatoes. My 15 plants (well, really 20 when you count the extras I just have to grow in pots when I run out of garden space) keep our family in tomatoes from mid-July through October. Some years the yields are light, or the mammals get more than their fair share of fruits, but I’m often offered tomatoes by the folks who received plants back in May. Gardeners are generous souls, and it’s delightful to receive a bag full of tangy red and golden globes as a thank you for the green plants offered months before.
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As I write in mid-March, I have 18 4-paks started—that’s 72 potential tomatoes. I only have room for, at the most, about 15 tomato plants in my raised-bed garden, but realism never seems to bother me in February and March, when I’m starting the year’s batch. Anyway, I love to grow things and I love to give tomato plants away in May. In fact, I don’t know what’s more rewarding--seeing the seedlings poke their way through their tiny soil beds, or giving away batches of seedlings to other gardeners a couple months later.