One High Dollar Tomato

Right when we walked in the door of the Lowes store there were displays of flower bulbs and seed and fertilizer and potting soil. And it was a pretty day. And immediately I thought of gardening and fresh tomatoes.

In my back yard there are four huge flower pots one of my daughters bought at some big bargain sale a few years ago. That meant we didn’t have to dig up the yard because I could do some pot gardening.. My daughter bought them twenty years ago so I know they are durable . It has rained in them. The water has frozen in them and they didn’t even crack. They survived summers of blistering heat and we raised a crop of good healthy mosquitoes (about the size of Texas buzzards) in the rain water that filled them one spring.

I was picking up one of those description tags on a tomato plant when Mr. B reminded me of the last time I decided to raise tomatoes in those same pots!

It all started like this:

The pots were there and I had dipped strongly into my paternal grandfather’s gene pool. He thought if something did not produce food then it shouldn’t take up space in the earth. I decided to plant tomatoes in my four big pots. Hey, if those pots could survive Oklahoma winters and summers they would support tomato roots.

I love vine ripened tomatoes. They just plain dress up any meal. Be it chicken and dumplings or shrimp scampi. So I went to a nice reputable green house and studied the tomato plants. I didn’t want those little cherry sized things they put in salads. Or the golf ball sized ones that barely make two bites, either. I wanted some of those big old boys. The ones that produce a nice size plate of slices for the dinner table.

Finally I picked out my four plants. I started to get eight, but there was no use in crowding them. Four plants should give us tomatoes from the first of July until frost time. After selecting the right size with the shortest growing season I went in search of just the right kind of potting soil for tomatoes.

When we got home I filled the pots and planted the tomatoes. I put the pots in front of lattice so if the vines were over laden with succulent fruit I could tie them up. Patience is a virtue. When they passed out virtues, I was over at the snow cone stand getting a rainbow snow cone in one of those pointed cups. Realizing my limitations in the patience department, I told myself to relax and let mother nature do her job. In 60 days according to the literature, I would have big, red ripe tomatoes just like the picture showed.

I began to water and put food on them at the right intervals and wait. When the temperature hit ninety I made sure the water was cool that I put on them every evening. I told them bedtime stories and counted the blooms. If every blossom made a tomato, the Jolly Green Giant might be standing in line trying to purchase my pots by the end of the summer.

Just a few more days and those little yellow critters would turn into little green BB’s and then they’d grow bigger and bigger until all four pots were filled with big red tomatoes. It was a beautiful vision.

The wind blew and the rain fell in great clumps and I worried about my tomato plants. Didn’t matter if it shook a few more limbs off the hackberry tree. It already was already pretty pitiful looking and besides I’ve never had a hankering for a tasty hackberry leaves. The next morning I rushed out to find my four babies all bend over, looking almost as ragged as the hackberry. I braced them up, fed them more of the tomato miracle food and waited.

Finally, there was a little tiny tomato underneath where the yellow bloom had been. Hallelujah! My first crop was just around the corner. No doubt about it, there would be enough to feed most of Murray County. I saw visions of there being so many tomatoes that I could make a few jars of my own spaghetti sauce and maybe even some home made ketchup.

I watered and waited. Watered and waited. The grasshoppers came and had supper one night and my vines were naked stalks the next day. But my tomato hung in there. It got as big as a grape and then a cherry. And then the worm found it.

At the end of the sixty days I harvested my one tomato. It was almost as big as a golf ball but by the time I cut the worm hole away it dwindled to one bite. When I figured up the cost of everything that went into that tomato, it was one expensive bite of food.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty dollars!

Thinking of that expensive bite of homegrown tomato did not make me rush over to buy tomato plants at the store this year. I rushed home and took a hammer to those pots, which is what I should have done years ago! Like Grandpa said, "If it don't produce food then it doesn't need to take up space in my yard!"