I Did It!

I did it!

I did it! I grew a tomato! I’ve been trying to grow that tomato for three years and I finally did it!

Let me explain.

I grew up growing things. Mom and Dad, children of The Great Depression, insisted on it. I think that was because they didn’t have a lot to eat back in the 1930s. So our garden was about two acres big, and they grew everything we ate.

I must admit, I didn’t do a lot of the gardening. I thought it was extremely boring back then. Oh, occasionally I’d go out and help Dad weed. But sometimes I would pull up a seedling instead of a weedling, and Dad would send me back to the house. In truth, he loved gardening.

Mom just did the cooking, and she was good at it. To this day, it is hard for me to eat out because nothing compares to the veggies straight out of the garden and on to the table. I particularly liked Mom’s green beans, cooked all day long with a chunk of salt pork, and fresh sliced tomatoes on the side. I’m hungry already.

But, again, I must confess, how badly I embarrassed Mom one day. I was cutting up my broccoli, which I like, when I noticed a bit of off-color green. The more I sliced the more I wondered what I had on my plate. That’s when I told Mom, “This isn’t broccoli. It’s a worm.”

Oh boy, did I get the Mom stare. I said Mom was good at cooking. Didn’t say anything about her veggie scrubbing abilities.

Later on, as the mother of three and married to a back-to-the-land sort of fellow, we put in a large garden of our own. And that’s when I began to draw upon those childhood years in the garden with Dad. Between all five of us, we managed to raise some pretty good food. And that’s when I found out how I loved to can and freeze. I can put away some of the best frozen strawberries ever, and had a pickled beet recipe that was out of this world.

But families grow up and grow apart, and I gave up gardening. It was too much work, just for myself. And my grown children were not interested at all.

Then retirement happened.

Boring is too mild a word for retirement. Good grief I had to get out of the house and back in the dirt. I started out with flowers. Hey, veggie gardening for one hardly seems worth it. And those flowers were amazing. They gave me hope.

So I put a couple of tomato plants in pots. Hot house tomatoes don’t appeal to me at all. I don’t buy or eat hot house tomatoes. They don’t even taste like the tomatoes I grew up on. Unfortunately, my potted tomatoes didn’t seem to want to produce tomatoes either.

Then Darling Daughter came by one day and wanted to know what I was going to do with some leftover tomato plants. “Give them to you,” I offered. Hum. She took a tomato plant, stuck it out in the ground, and, believe it or not, that was the only plant that produced a tomato that year.

Good grief. What had I done wrong? Got to looking around, asking some questions. And yes, I did notice there was a lack of bees in my little garden. Tomato flowers require bees. I knew that much. And they must fly from flower to flower.

So this year I planted my two tomato plant with another plan in mind. I went armed with a cotton swab. Hey, if the bees didn’t show up to do the job, I could handle it myself. But I must confess, when I explained the purpose of that cotton swab to Granddaughter, I embarrassed her into a bright-red face. Yes, it all had to do with the Birds and the Bees. Really!

But, I got tomatoes. I got more than one tomato. I’ve got a bunch of tomatoes. Yippee! I’m back to gardening.

Now grown daughter and grown son are digging in the dirt themselves, and have their own tomato plants.

Wow. There is hope for the future.