By Gene Paleno
When my wife and I moved to Witter Springs I wanted a tomato garden like we had when I was a boy in Michigan. The small hill on which our house was built was roughly a hundred feet in diameter. After the bulldozer cleared the top for the house it left room on the southeast edge for a small garden. We were ready to plant.
A few million years ago our small valley was part of the Pacific Ocean. Later it was an inland sea. When we dug a hole for the telephone and electricity pole in the front of our house 6 feet deep in the hole I found a 4-inch-wide salt-water bivalve prehistoric clam shell. I knew, when we planted, our house and our garden were sitting on a rock. I hoped the coating of soil that had collected on the hill over the eons would be enough for a garden.
To keep the deer from eating up the garden I had to fence the garden. An 8-foot cattle fence surrounded the garden plot to protect my tomato plants from hungry dear and jackrabbits. The first long-eared jackrabbit I saw made me realize that the open latticed cattle fence was an invitation to every rabbit so I put up chicken wire outside the cattle fence to discourage the rabbits and small critters.
When a garden project is a partnership instead of a sole proprietorship, as ours was, why then every decision between my good wife and me has to be a compromise. I would have been happy to have the entire 1,500 square feet in tomatoes but her wiser head and her better judgment (not distorted by my passion for tomatoes) prevailed. My practical wife suggested melon, kale, beans, corn, peppers and a few other comestibles in addition to my tomatoes. That was fine with me. I like to eat well. We would have a real all-around garden.
When I planted the garden I made mistakes. For one, I was overly kind to my tomato plants. That may be the reason they grew to 6 and 7 feet tall. Also they had thousands of tomatoes on each plant. The poor peppers were lost in the murky darkness behind the unusually healthy and leafy tomato bushes. The tomato plants grew so large one could easily mistake a plant for a young tree. Since they may be picked from the branches just like our apples and pears, there is some reason to call tomatoes fruit instead of a vegetable.
I planted too many tomato plants. Instead of the six plants that she suggested I put in 24 plants. The days and weeks that followed brought plenty of tomatoes to our table. They were coming fast and furious.
I had not counted on quite so many. Each morning I could be certain the vines held another few dozen ripe tomatoes. I couldn’t eat them nearly fast enough.
My practical wife refuses to waste anything. She made dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, and tomato juice. Nearly every night we had spaghetti covered with tomato sauce. I drank gallons of tomato juice. She dried bushels of tomato slices. She processed our bumper tomato crop but she was not very happy about it. It got to the point where Mildred and her two assistants at the post office cringed when they saw me coming with more tomatoes. When I offered to share the kitchen work with my overworked spouse, to boil the skins and slice for dried tomatoes, she wouldn’t hear of it. “You are not fastidiousness enough,” she told me. She is a perfectionist and I sometimes take shortcuts.
She was sure the entire burden of the garden work rested on her shoulders. I made a list of my share of the work so that she would understand that I carried some of the load.
ME:
1. Fencing and keeping the fence mended.
2. Spading garden.
3. Tilling soil around the plants several times a year.
4. Hoeing weeds often.
5. Gopher hole stomping.
6. Making compost from kitchen scraps.
7. Watering garden.
8. Putting boards and coffee can under each melon to keep them off the dirt.
9. More gopher hole stomping.
My list did not impress her.
“After all,” she reasoned, “I have to supervise all of your work. That is much harder than turning over a few shovels of dirt.”
Next year I’ll plant fewer tomatoes. That’s a promise I have made every year but never keep.
