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Bread And Butter: Notes On A Garden

green and red tomatoes on a vine
pixabay.com

I’ve helped my son grow a garden all summer. While I don’t have a particularly green thumb, it’s more of a light shade of chartreuse, bumped up from the deathly shade of black from when I was younger, I can experiment enough to get a taste of fresh through the dog days that linger.

This summer, with a lot of time on our hands and no time away staring us in the face, we sat and made a plan. We had never grown tomatoes or peppers from seed, so those were started indoors early in the spring. I had little hope, watching our butcher paper holders during the last dredges of winter, my son had a lot. 

May arrived and we transplanted our speck of tomato, pepper and cantaloupe plants and then planted peas, spinach, lettuce, onions and cauliflower in the just waking up dirt. I cautioned my son that the tomatoes, the four that made it to transplant, would probably not grow. Old seeds and from seed? My gardening magic wasn’t that strong.

I underestimated the power of nature, however.

Our pea plants took off. I discovered the green arrow variety a few years ago and look forward to them with regularity. They are simply my favorite. By the time we had pulled the plants in early July, we’d had a steady stream of several vines. Success! The spinach and lettuce were welcome additions to our salads for several weeks in June and we are hoping to squeeze in another round before snowfalls. Our onions didn’t grow at all and while our cauliflower produced a lovely purple green base and leaves, we were left without the main event. I called time of death in early July. 

Our melon plant is going strong, but I’m starting to doubt the fruit will ripen before the season is over, as it seemed to get a slow start. Our peppers didn’t survive transplanting, which was just as well because, well, our tomatoes did.

I’m not certain what I was expecting. Actually, that’s not really true. I was expecting nice normal, manageable, tomato plants that would yield a bit of fruit. In late June and early July, I didn’t think we’d even get that. The weather was uneven, making growth terribly slow. We had four plants survive and one was so small, I thought of pulling it to make room for something else. Sheer laziness on my part kept it in the ground. And then it took its revenge. Our garden box sits about six feet from the wall of our home. It’s raised and a bit insulated and gets some lovely reflected heat. Sometime in July, the tomato plants decided to take over those six feet and box us in. 

Overnight, it seemed, my son’s struggling plants exploded and took over…everything. We could no longer see where one plant started and another ended. It overtook our carrots and encroached on our cantaloupe. Several limbs grew and twisted so far, I couldn’t successfully wind them back onto poles and proper spaces. Realizing I was in over my head, quite literally, I took to social media with a plea for help. Can you prune tomato plants or was I destined to be socially distanced from my fruit when they finally turned red?

My sister in law, whom I consider the person I’m most likely going to find when the zombies come, said yes, I could, and walked me through it. In mid-August, my son and I trimmed and tied and cajoled branches into order and picked our first cherry tomatoes, born of seed and my

son’s stubborn determination. We’ve had to prune twice more since and continue to twist and tie and keep the peace. But the growth hasn’t stopped. 

What I’ve since learned is we did not, in fact, plant the perfect tomato plants that stay in their cage and stop growing when thigh high. What we planted was more akin to the never-ending growth cycle of a mid-teen with a bottomless pit and new pants. Except the teen eventually stops growing. I honestly had no idea! 

I would love to tell you the variety of plants we ended up with, but my son just reached into the tomato seed pile and picked a few. I know we have two cherry tomato varieties and two bigger, normal-sized varieties, and that all four are the variety that will sprout and flower six inches every night. I wish I did know, so as to be able to add that to our 2020 garden journal notes and save us amazement and room another year.

We did sneak in a watermelon plant at the far end of the box, but I’ve nearly given up on it producing and added another round of spinach and lettuce to carry us into fall, but so far, I’m worried they have all become rather afraid of our tomato plants that won’t stop and are being shy about growing. I get it. It’s an intimidating sight. And one I can firmly blame on the gardening gene skipping a generation, my chartreuse thumb blazing to evergreen with my son.