Everything New

When I first started gardening, everything about it was new. I was on NW Boulevard with my mother, shopping not far from our home across from Audubon Park. She was in Herbeson's Pharmacy, picking up sundries. I had wandered across the street to the hardware store. This was long before Rite-Aid and Home Depot, when most everything you needed you could buy at a reasonable price close to home—including plants for the garden. There I was standing before the rack of plants, taking in the tomato plants, dark green plants with tiny star-shaped flowers. I can remember the excitement I felt—the idea of growing something—having a plant of my own in the yard, troweling the dirt around it's sturdy stem—and then my mother crossed the street, a cigarette in one hand, a package in the other. She seemed happy to see me standing there with the plants.

It's funny how some memories stand out, little snipets so alive in the mind. This one is very clear, me asking for the tomato plant, and mother responding happily, laughing easily—you want to grow tomatoes? Of course, you can. And I went home with my first plant, a tiny thing that I dug in the ground between her pink petunias, right next to the pool. And they flourished there. It was hot and moist and when company came over to swim and eat burgers, the folks would comment on the large tomatoes ripening on a vine that curled on the ground. Many gave me advice. You should stake the plant, you can pull it in the fall and hang it in the garage, you can pick the green tomatoes and make relish, you can make green tomato pie, you can wrap the green tomatoes and put them in a dark place, use newspaper and they'll ripen. You'll have tomatoes for long into the fall.

Come fall, I pulled the tomato plant and hung it in the garage. It frosts early in Spokane, sometimes September. And tomatoes don't last, kale does, cabbage does, chard does, but tomatoes don't, it's hard, but the plant has to be pulled. Ah, the smell of a tomato vine. So sour and robust. I good thing to have on the hands, along with smears of green—what is that potent green—chlorophyll? And of course, like the potato, the tomato family, being a member of the nightshade family, has poisonous leaves. And the first that big limp vine hung there in the garage, a shrine of tomatoes ripening, it was a sight to see, but then they started to rot and fall onto the garage floor and it wasn't long before I had to Get rid of that thing.

All in all, my early inoculation into growing tomatoes went well. It was a happy experience and every year after that I grew tomatoes, I think until I was in high school and my younger sister became the vegetable gardener in the family, that and mother's petunias were what our family did for gardening.

In the photo, the little sprout that grows where the stems branches from the main stem can be removed. Do this on all stems leading off from the main one, this way you will have less energy going into greenery and more into fruit.

Ciao!