Dumped tomatoes live again

By Libby James
North Forty News

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Odwalla. Hill Billy. Cherokee Purple. Brandywine.

I'd never tried to grow an heirloom variety. Too difficult, I'd read. And so I stuck to Big Boy, Early Girl, Celebrity, and when harvest time came, I never could remember what was what and I didn't much care.

Until last summer. By August the small plot of land that had once been my back yard was under siege by a series of tomato explosions. On and on they went, rising up and covering my new windy path through the garden, obstructing my accustomed route to the tool area and compost pile, crawling overland toward my tiny patio. I wanted to yell "Help!" but instead I kept my harvesting basket close by and dutifully picked for weeks and weeks.

I begged friends, neighbors, even casual passersby, to take home a few tomatoes. I made salsa and spaghetti sauce, and ate tomato sandwiches every day for lunch for what seemed like a lifetime. I fried, baked, broiled and ate 'em right off the vine.

As the season progressed, I knew there was no way half these babies were gonna ripen before Jack Frost arrived. (Secretly, I prayed for his early arrival.) I started picking green ones. Down to the basement they went to ripen quietly in the dark. I only stored the "perfect" ones, knowing from past experience that any blemish can turn a hard green globe into a pile of stinking mush in a very few days.

Until the summer of 2008, I had an unremarkable back yard bordered by a brick garage wall, a thick old privet hedge, my neighbor's wood fence and the north wall of my house. It featured a narrow, straight, concrete walk through the middle and along one edge leading to the garage, a compost pile in one corner and a couple of narrow beds adjacent to the garage wall. I grew tomatoes along that wall with moderate success.

The grass was old and had had a hard life. Now and then over the years I'd aerated, fertilized, even reseeded during one particularly energetic season, but all in all, dandelions were the healthiest things that grew, no matter how many hours I spent digging them up.

I didn't intend to eliminate the grass in my back yard but when the process of adding a space to the back of my house left piles of dirt and concrete strewn everywhere, I decided to turn my back yard into a garden - not all at once, but over time.

In May, I hauled away every extra newspaper the North Forty News had that month. I laid the newspapers down in my garden in thick, overlapping layers. "We use only soy-based ink," the editor reported. Good, I thought. I hoped the newspapers would smother the remaining bits of grass and the organic soil I used to cover them would provide a good base for planting.

By late spring I'd transplanted a few herbs and flowers from other spots in my yard, bought a few tomato plants, and was trying to decide what else I'd add this season, when I got a call from Tim, my favorite scavenger.

"Hey, you need any tomato plants?" he asked. "I've got more than I can use."

"Sure," I said, and before I knew it, Tim was in my back yard unloading flat after flat of not only heirloom tomato plants but banana peppers, and several kinds of basil as well.

"Where did you get all these plants?" I asked. "Why aren't you putting them in your yard?" I knew Tim had a big space and was an expert gardener.

"I've planted all I can use," he said. "I found these in a dumpster."

The plants looked a little bedraggled, but they were certainly far from dead. "Why in the world would someone throw away flats and flats of perfectly good plants?" I asked.

"Who knows," he said, resigned after long years at his avocation to the mystery of why people throw away - rather than give away or recycle - perfectly good, useable items.

Ours is not to question why, I thought to myself, as I began digging the first of many holes into which I placed my exotic tomato plants. I surrounded each with a cage, made a little waterproof label for each plant and attached it to the cage with a twisty tie.

And so began the summer of the tomato. Those plants loved my place. Where mediocre tomatoes had grown before, huge luscious monsters emerged. Probably I watered them more. Probably that organic soil was just what they needed. Maybe the soy-based ink on those newspapers was the secret to their success. Who knows?

This year, I'll be older and wiser, and I'll be more careful about the number of cast-off tomato plants I allow into my yard.