Tomatoes

It has been a truly overwhelming month around here and yesterday, I found myself with my first really quiet day in a long time. Part of me wanted to just sit and stare at a wall for an hour or two, but instead I did some planting. We’re still holding off on starting the plants that need really warm weather, since last year the sun didn’t come out until July, but for the first time in a long time, I’m going to have to make room for tomato starts.

I have a love/hate relationship with tomatoes. I like the way they taste and they are useful in so many dishes. Plus they’re easy to preserve as sauce or salsa. But they always ripen at the time of year when I’m out of energy, those long August days before the kids go back to school but after they’ve run out of ways to entertain themselves. Usually at that point, the last thing I want to do with my quiet moments is go wade through bushy tomato plants and harvest them, just to have to figure out what to do with them before they go bad.

And, to make it worse, I always miss one or two so that if I try to rotate my beds the next year, I’m picking out tomato plant volunteers left and right. And to make it even worse, the last time I started tomatoes inside, I didn’t have room for all of them in one bed and wanted to compost the rest, but Forrest couldn’t bear the waste and planted them in our flower beds instead. Our flower beds!

All of that to say, I’ve spent the last few years just tending whatever volunteers come up and mostly ignoring them. But this year, I’m giving up on having a dedicated raised bed for tomatoes and just putting them in containers in my backyard. It feels a bit like failure for some reason, admitting that I am simply not up to processing 15 tomato plants’ worth of produce. Capitulating to the fact that while I love planting the things and enjoy tending them, the whole canning/preserving side of gardening just isn’t my jam. (Pun intended.)

I think part of that is because to me, the appeal of gardening is that I get to be outside. I get to enjoy the most beautiful part of the year in a way that is both peaceful and satisfying. The idea of taking some of our short summer and spending it over a stove in a hot kitchen? No, thank you.

There’s something about living where we live - life is so indoors for so much of the year, that when it gets nice, we do everything outside. Our yard has various stations so we can follow the shade around throughout the day - Adirondack chairs on our shade deck, outdoor couch on the grotto, hammocks in the girls’ garden. It all sounds very fancy until you realize that our shady retreats are interspersed with the messiness of life with kids - a discarded art project on the deck, an unraveled hose sprawled across the yard, and lots and lots of ratty dog toys.

And now, we’ll be adding some pots of tomatoes to the mix. Hopefully they’ll be pretty, but knowing me, I’ll just grab whatever old plastic buckets I’ve got to hand and make it work. And we’ll grow as many tomatoes as we can eat (and hopefully not many more than that!). And I’ll give up on one dream of maximum tomato production in exchange for another dream - a lazier, more relaxed dream of sun warmed tomatoes and kids eating them off the vine.