The Last Tomato...

Snow came to the Valley today, wet, heavy stuff that stuck to the ground until early afternoon. It's November and the swirling bunny tails serve to remind us that the winter solstice is just around the corner. From the kitchen window I watched the white tufts sift through the bare branches of the backyard maple. A handful of summer tomatoes lining the window sill seemed to shiver at the spectacle outside. This reminded me...

Just yesterday in the produce section at Fred Meyers, I rolled my shopping cart past a lady shopper and couldn't help notice a half dozen tomatoes among the other items in her basket. During gardening season a smugness comes over this Valley gardener whenever I see shoppers buying produce I harvest daily from the backyard garden. Smugness? Perhaps "sense of gratitude" is the better phrase: "smug" seems condescending and a man who labors in the soil should be above such thoughts. Agreed?

I think about the lady's tomatoes, how looks can deceive: they appear to be top rate produce: "vine ripened," perfectly shaped...for all appearances not unlike my remaining windowsill crop. But I know from experience, flavor, like beauty, is only skin deep. Since mid-August we've gathered vine ripened tomatoes from the garden patch: fruit encouraged by Valley sunshine and river bottom soil, each ruby orb gushing rich tomato flavor. Those tomatoes in our lady's basket? Hothouse or hydroponic produce, most likely...bland, dry, pasty textured. And as the windowsill crop dwindles, our winter salads sadly will soon be like hers.

The garden went in late this year. As the corn farmers of the mid-west would say, "Too wet to get in the fields." Such was the case here. I figured with our short growing season chances for harvesting a decent tomato crop were nil. That brought to mind a Garrison Keillor Lake Woebegone tale about the late frost that took some neighbors by surprise and brought on a tomato famine come harvest time. "Well, didn't you cover your plants? (Now there's smugness for you.) We covered ours...suspected there'd be frost that night. Didn't you know? Help yourself to some of ours. We have plenty." Oh, the indignity for the backyard gardener! Tomatoes from a neighbor! I'd sooner steal the plastic ones from that lady's shopping cart than accept tomatoes gifted by a fellow gardener.

Fifty-seven days without rain saved our bacon, (or should I say "our BLTs"), retained my pride, kept me from committing petite tomato larceny. My go-to variety, Early Girl, set a bumper crop. As Early Girl tends to be susceptible to late summer blight, I took some proactive measures in mid-August, applied a copper fungicide (Certified Organic) and a week or two later sealed the deal by removing most of the blight-prone foliage from the vines. By early September I was harvesting two to three pounds of fruit a day.

For two or three weeks the steam and pressure canners labored hard to keep up with the jars of sauce, salsa, and stewed tomatoes. Every so often I'd give the kitchen range a break by quartering, bagging, and freezing zip-loc bags full of flavorful fruit. We juiced tomatoes; we sliced tomatoes into our evening salads; we layered tomatoes on toast for our lunch repasts; we ate tomatoes fresh as one would apples; we stirred tomatoes into dollops of cottage cheese; we dipped tomatoes in egg wash, flour and corn meal, and fried them. The tomato crop did indeed runneth over....

As of this post a solitary tomato is all that remains of the summer crop. We used two of the remaining three this past weekend: salsa verde with garden jalapenos and onions and lime Doritos for dipping while we watched the home team struggle for naught on the gridiron. One last salad for the sole remainder of the crop and then eight and a half more months of those plasticized tomato impostors from Freddie's.

But for now--at the risk of sounding smug--our pantry and freezer brim with tomato bounty, surplus enough to tide us over until next year's vines are laden once again.

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