I love tomatoes. Always have. If I could sing, I’d be singing a K.D. Lang tune as I visit the tomato section of the produce area (“I can’t remember not lovin’ youuuuuuuu”).
It doesn’t matter how tomatoes are served, I love ‘em.
Sliced for sandwiches, wedges for salad, diced for pico de gallo — it’s all good. Cooked for spaghetti sauce, fried while still green, crushed for chili — there’s nothing better.
Slicing tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes — doesn’t matter.
Oh, and ketchup … mmmmm, good.
Any way you say it — tuh-MAY-toe or tuh-MAH-toe — pronunciation doesn’t matter when it comes to this fabulous, nutritious fruit known as a vegetable. It’s hard to believe that such a widely used food source was once considered deadly poisonous.
True story.
French botonist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort provided the Latin botanical name lycopersicon esculentum to the tomato — which translates to “wolfpeach” … peach because it was round and luscious, and wolf because it was erroneously considered poisonous. The botonist mistakenly took the tomato for the wolfpeach referred to by Claudius Galenus in his 3rd century writings — i.e., poison in a palatable package which was used to destroy wolves.
Maybe I’ve learned y’all something today.
Anyway, over the years I’ve looked forward to spring, when I can get a few different varieties of tomato plants in the ground at home. And every year, I envision being able to walk out my back door and pull a fresh, ripe tomato off the vine and use it within minutes. There’s just nothing like a fresh, homegrown anything — but especially a tomato.
The last few years, I’ve saved a space in the garden for five tomato plants. And even though I can’t convince her to eat a tomato, my granddaughter always looks forward to helping me plant, water and then pick tomatoes.
But this year, I decided to go bigger.
Back in April, just like ever spring, I began scouring area nurseries and stores that carried vegetable plants for just the right tomato plants. It’s not a science, but time should be taken to find good, sturdy looking plants before purchasing. That trek has proven successful, and has also taken me from Lumberton to Florence, South Carolina, to find the right plants.
Usually, I am rewarded with numerous succulent, red tomatoes throughout the summer.
Having decided to expand my vision of red, bulbous tomatoes, I bought nine tomato plants of various types — from the Early Girl to the Beefmaster. And once my granddaughter and I got the garden tilled, the holes dug, the plants in the ground and the area fertilized and watered … well, I couldn’t wait for that first bud to pop itself into a tomato.
That happened last month, and there was joyous celebration.
I watched that tomato — my “first born” — and several others that followed grow bigger and bigger. The day of plucking them off the vine was closing in.
And here’s an aside: Have you ever taken the time to smell a tomato vine? You should. It has a distinct smell that you will equate with other summer smells like freshly cut grass. Just saying.
Back to the story.
It happened on a Friday, if I recall. I arrived home from work to find my granddaughter standing at the garden’s edge. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “Poppy, all the tomatoes are gone!”
I’m sure all the color drained from my face and my heart made a bee-line for my ankles. It felt like someone had booted me in the breadbasket, but I held on desperately to the hope that she was kidding, as 13-year-olds tend to do.
She wasn’t.
Every tomato, perhaps 15 of them, were gone. Vanished. Poof. And it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened.
Just as they were about to reach the prime of their delicious lives, they were stolen.
For the next few weeks, every single tomato that grew to a decent size suffered the same fate. Just before the green had time to change to orange, it disappeared. Figuring it up at $2.29 per pound, I estimate that we lost at least $57 in stolen tomatoes. It was enough to rile me pretty good, especially when I had to purchase tomatoes at the grocery store.
And I had all but talked myself into calling the police … but couldn’t.
You see, the tomatoes weren’t stolen by a neighbor, local hooligans or even a hungry passing person. In fact, it wasn’t a person at all. It was squirrels.
That’s right. Squirrels.
Can’t call the police chief for that one. And I doubt that PETA would stop laughing at me long enough to even hang up (though I bet they’d care if I loaded up the BB gun).
On Sunday, I fought back the only way I knew how. I went out to the garden, took a deep breath and yanked up every one of those plants. A few small, green tomatoes were rescued and saved just in case they amount to anything. But I figured, if I can’t enjoy my own tomatoes, then neither will those darned squirrels.
Oh well. It’s only about 231 days — that’s 3,244 hours or 194,640 minutes or 11,678,400 seconds — until I start scouting tomato plants again.
W. Curt Vincent can be reached at 910-506-3023 or cvincent@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.
