For the Love of a Tomato Plant
And how I began to enjoy gardening
Among my family members, I am notoriously a terrible gardener. I’ve earned that reputation not necessarily for the lack of skill or even enthusiasm, rather for the lack of resolve. It often usually comes down to lack of watering or even just doing the very basic research about, say, the spacing out of seeds or any other element of gardening. I tend to wing it.
For the majority of the past 5 years, I have planted something in the ground. I would not even go so far as to call them “gardens” because that seems to connote some sort of organization. So let’s call them a few spaces of soil with plants in them.
This is how it often goes…
Around late March when the winter chill begins to abate and the clouds kind of part every now and then, I get super excited about the approaching spring. As such, I take a trip to the garden store. I wander wide-eyed and excited about the various varieties of seedlings that are at my disposal. I begin to picture my one little garden bed and my various pots overgrowing in the late summer with a rainbow of veggies that I grew myself. Kale! Basil! Peppers! Zucchini! And, Tomatoes!!!
I often purchase way more than can fit in the various soil-containing receptacles, but no mind, in that moment at the garden store, I am a gardener with infinite possibilities ahead of me. Upon returning home, I promptly put those purchased seedlings next to the garage and think to myself: I will plant these tomorrow. Reader: I did not plant those seedlings “tomorrow.” In fact, those seedlings often sit for several days, each day my husband asking me kindly “so, when do you think you’ll plant those?” Eventually, though, I do plant those seedlings. And each time, I find that I have way too many seedlings for the aforementioned receptacles. But I can’t waste these beautiful seedlings, I must plant them all. And so I do. Without much organization or care for the fact that many of these plants need space in order to grow properly. Nonetheless, I persist and I get excited and take very good care of those plans for a few days.
What’s beautiful about Oregon spring is that nature often does the watering for me. What’s not great for people-who-don’t-have-gardening-resolve, is that when that rain eventually does stop, you’ve already gotten used to not watering and you try to set a daily reminder for yourself and then just begin to ignore it. So keeping that garden up becomes a test of my ability to remember to do the very basic thing to keep plants alive. Yet, somehow the garden still grows–and it may possibly be because my dear spouse realizes how little I have watered and will just do it before he leaves for work.
The result of this annual garden is, as you can imagine, a mixed bag. The kale and the Swiss chard always do well. I always plant kale and Swiss chard because they seem to grow despite my shitty gardening abilities. But the tomatoes often die and many of the other things are just tiny and bitter because I didn’t space them out.
And, I might add that this does not even include the very spectacular failures of yore such as the ~5 gardens I planted as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi that succumbed to such things as an apocalyptic beetle infestation, massive flooding from crazy rainy season downpours, and quite honestly, general lack of understanding about how to grow anything. The Malawians–who are almost all subsistence farmers–for good reason thought I was quite amusing. Or the year Cory and I grew beautifully luscious tomato plants on our Baltimore patio that produced not even one tomato.
This year, though, I vowed to do something right in the garden. It didn’t start out that well given that it wasn’t until April that I even thought about it even though I had been telling myself: This is the year, start researching in February, get those heirloom seeds now. However, given that our spring cold and rain lasted nearly until July, it wasn’t all so bad on the lack-of-planning front.
I opted to keep it simple: radishes from seed and seedlings of carrots, kale, chard, basil, and, of course, my white whale, two heirloom tomato plants. I was ambitious going for the heirloom varieties vs. something a bit more standard. As noted the kale and chard have been the workhorses of the garden. The basil, too, which consequently is also the only vegetable my five-year-old will eat (I mean, WTF?!). The radishes and carrots, well, failed. I knew as they grew I had already fucked it up because they grew super close together, so they produced tiny, bitter, barely edible vegetables. I left them in way too long hoping against hope that maybe I was wrong. So we finally dug them up and composted most of them.
And then there are the tomatoes. Which, if you follow along on Instagram, have been the center of my personal Cramming for the Apocalypse drama. Come late July, they had grown into the very luscious plants that one hopes from a tomato plant. But there was not one tomato by the beginning of August. As I walked around the neighborhood and saw others’ beautiful tomatoes beginning to grow, I got worried. I’ve done it again! I thought to myself. It was a sad reminder of that one Baltimore summer where Cory and I failed to grow any tomatoes.
But then I took deep breaths and went on vacation and hoped that our dog sitter’s more fastidious watering abilities would help keep these plants going. And lo and behold, I returned to TWO WHOLE TOMATOES. Eventually those two turned into five and then eventually turned into 15! I had done it! I had grown a tomato! I had grown tomatoes…plural!
Check out the surprise and delight from my mother on this turn of events (also I may have posted this video on TikTok just so I can share the video here):
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But, my friends, the drama still continued because those beautiful tomatoes all grew to what I assumed to be their final size (my mom, the gardener, confirmed as much) and just sat there looking beautiful and very green. “What the hell?! Why is this taking so damn long?!” I said in no uncertain terms to myself and my Instagram followers and my mom by text and to any of my friends who are seemingly invested in my “garden.” “Patience,” my mom would text back. “Pick them off the vine and let them ripen on the counter,” many people recommended.
Then I took a deep breath and figured–thanks to a confirming text message with my friend who is a very good gardener–that I would just leave them on the vine. Given that we’re deep into a very climate changey year, we’re well into October and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be hitting a frosty morning for some time now (which is a whole other thing). So I let them sit.
And you know what happened? The first two tomatoes to show up began to ripen right after I posted my dismay at the lack of ripening! So, I went out and took pictures every damn day to mark this occasion. And then, of course, as I went out to finally snip them off the vine on the day sixth of October of the year twenty twenty two, a fucking squirrel had taken a chunk out of one of them. But nevermind, I harvested those tomatoes and rejoiced!
The patience had paid off. AND there are still 13 more tomatoes to ripen.
I’ll say this from the experience of this year’s garden is that I learned a lot about myself along the way. The major thing is that I did not only care about this garden, I was invested in it. This garden became more than just a project to feed my family (I mean, it’s barely feeding anyone and probably mostly feeding the squirrels) rather it was a project of learning to deeply care about the process. I checked on that tomato plant several times a day throughout the summer. And when the tomatoes started to come up, I’d go out and count those freaking tomatoes during those visits. And with each visit, I got excited and interested in the activity. I even took a daily video tracking the ripening of the tomatoes and made a compilation video that is so very pleasing to me whether or not anyone else cares.
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In previous years I knew very well I didn’t know what I was doing but made little effort to do any research. I’m not saying I did a ton of research this year, but the personal investment in this project made me want to do a bit more than I had in the past. I googled more gardening youtube videos (often the tomato-centric ones) than I have probably ever.
And, you know what, it was fun. It made me want to learn more and actually do it right next year from the very beginning.
I don’t think I ever expect to be or become a super-awesome-incredible-master gardener. I don’t know if at this point I would consider myself a true gardener, but I know that I have it in me to claim that title as gardener sometime down the road. At the very least, though, I learned to like gardening. And all it took was one tomato plant that stole my heart.
