Now friends, settle in and listen close, for I’ve got a tale as ripe and juicy as a Brandywine in July, and just about as messy.
It all began, innocently enough, with a seed catalog. You know the kind—so full of promise, so full of heirloom dreams. There I was, sipping dandelion root tea and thumbing through pages like a kid in a candy store, when I laid eyes on the Tomato Section. And oh, what a section it was: Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Mortgage Lifter, and something called a Spoon Tomato no bigger than a ladybug’s hiccup.
I blacked out somewhere around page 27 and woke up three hours later surrounded by seed packets and an overconfidence typically reserved for squirrels crossing busy highways.
“Thirty-two varieties,” I declared to my compost pile, which is where I do most of my best thinking. “That’s a reasonable number for a small backyard plot.”
Now, for those of you who’ve never planted thirty-two varieties of tomatoes, let me offer you a bit of soil-seasoned wisdom: tomatoes are like cats. You think you’re adopting just one or two, but soon your windowsills are full, your furniture smells funny, and you’re hiding from your neighbors.
Come May, I planted them all. I gave them names. I gave them trellises. I even played them Mozart (scientifically inconclusive but emotionally satisfying). By July, it was a jungle so dense I feared I’d lose a limb if I reached too far for a Sungold.
The soil microbes were partying like it was 1999. The beneficial nematodes unionized. I’m pretty sure one plant had a hummingbird living in it. Somewhere around the fourth harvest, I began dreaming in marinara.
Neighbors stopped waving and started backing away slowly. At one point, I saw a raccoon carrying off a San Marzano like it owed him money.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good tomato. They’re the jewels of the summer garden, packed with lycopene, B vitamins, and the kind of umami that’ll make your mitochondria do a little dance. But there comes a point, dear reader, when you must ask yourself:
“Do I really need 19 pounds of tomatoes per day?”
And the answer, scientifically speaking, is only if you’ve also started a side business in gazpacho futures.
Eventually, I found myself hiding zucchini in unlocked cars just to make room in the fridge for yet another tray of Costoluto Genovese. I made tomato paste, tomato jam, tomato leather, and what I can only describe as tomato-based regret.
But as the season waned, and the leaves yellowed, and the soil sighed in relief, I sat back in my lawn chair, sticky with juice and pride, and I realized something:
This is how we learn.
We overplant. We overstretch. We over-Mortgage-Lift. And in doing so, we find the limits of our trellises and the resilience of our microbial communities. We also, incidentally, discover just how many mason jars one human can own.
So next year, I’ll dial it back.
Probably.
Maybe.
We’ll see what the catalog says.
That’s all I have to say, I will say no more. 🍅
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