Beastly Battles

Have you noticed the tomatoes in recent years? They are not the tomatoes of yesteryear. It used to be that you could walk through the tomato garden, on a hot summer day, and pluck a tomato off the vine, rub it on your shirt to get the enviromental dust off, and take a bite of it and enjoy. The juice would trickle down your chin and the acidic taste would nip your tongue and you could experience pure gastronomical pleasure.

Tomatoes are an integral part of my diet. My dad raised tomatoes in his garden but still when September came, he went out and purchased bushels of tomatoes for my mother to can. She canned about one hundred cans of whole tomatoes and fifty or more bottles of catsup. The tomatoes out of the backyard garden graced our table at every meal. In the fall before the frost could hit them, we picked the green tomatoes and fried them or wrapped them in news paper,stored them in a closet and let them ripen.

In recent years I've had to depend on "store bought" tomatoes and they leave a lot to be desired. First of all, I like to peel my tomatoes, dipping them in a pot of boiling water for a nano second and slipping the skin off to get to the solid red 'meat' of the tomato, that is essential to me.Have you tried to peel a 'store bought' tomato? Today's tomatoes are hard, tough, pale,and almost tasteless. I took a class at Bellarmine a year or so ago and one of the guest speakers was from one of the tomato processing plants in this region. We saw films of the tomatoes being processed. The open simi trucks filled with tomatoes are unloaded at the plant by machinery that picks the tomatoes up and drops them down a shute to fill containers that move on a conveyor belt into the plant. The presenter told us that the tomatoes have been geneticly altered to have tough skins so that they can be handled in mass. They are also uniform in size to accommodate the machinery that will be removing the skins and whatever else they do to get them ready. (This particular plant made the tomato sauce for Domino's Pizza.)The same kind of tomatoes are what the stores,and fruit markets offer for sale to us. Paul's has what they call Heirloom tomatoes that closely resemble "real" tomatoes but the price, when they have them, is prohibitive.

I decided that I would grow a few plants, in containers, on my deck so that I could have my own supply this summer. I bought two plants and planted the smaller of the two, a few weeks ago. I thought it might be wise to wait until the rains, winds and low temperatures were gone before I planted the larger one.I kept it inside to wait for warmer, sunnier days.

I planted the small tomato one evening and the next morning went out to check on it only to discover that a squirrel had dug it up, threw dirt all over the table, and ate the roots and all the leaves except for the top most leaves! Not good! The plant in the kitchen, meanwhhile, is doing well. Now that warm days and cool nights have arrived it is really time to think about placing it outside but...I'll digress here and tell you about my avocado seed that I have kept in water, in a glass, in the kitchen window waiting to plant it outside,too. I planted it yesterday and I'm sure you've already guessed that it also met the same fate as the tomato plant. Although, it was not completely devoured.

I bought potting soil and I have a container that I think would be ideal for my tomato plant but twice bitten once shy, as the saying goes, I am planning a trip to Home Depot to buy some hardware cloth or mesh screening or something to see if I can foil the evil squirrel! I already went to K-Mart but had no luck there. I did buy one of those cages for the tomato vine to grow on in the event that I succeed at matching wits with the little beast!

I'm trying to remain optomistic. Y'all come for tomato pie in August! OK? Ciao