Tomatoes: You're My Obsession

I'm obsessed with finding the perfect tomato. One that has time to ripen on the vine into luscious sunshine sweetness. 


I love me some caprese salad, which is a tomato slice topped with a thin slice of fresh mozzarella drizzled with unctuous olive oil and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts. Maybe basil if you're feeling crazy. 

My obsession for the perfect tomato has led me to grow some on my deck for the past three years. Maybe four. I started a heritage breed called Pink Berkeley from seed in a warm, sunny window next to my dressing table in my bedroom. Throughout the cool days of spring, I check them almost daily for progress. The boys get into it too, helping to spritz them with water and reporting back to me what they notice. "Mama, this one has three little baby leaves now." That kind of thing. Such simple things please me. 

I've achieved the perfect tomato once. Any further attempts have failed. Miserably.

I will not, cannot, do not eat tomatoes purchased from the grocery store even if they are stickered "vine ripened." Grocery store tomatoes are vapid, squishy things that are virtually tasteless.

In June, I bought some tomatoes from the local farmer's market, and they were good, but I deliberately refrained from purchasing a lot because I expected a win fall of my own. It's easy to go hog wild with tomatoes then quickly burn out on them.

tomato hornworm caterpillar

I picked off 9 tomato hornworm caterpillars, tossing them over the deck into the lawn, hoping that some of the birds would swoop down from the trees to eat them. The top of one plant is nearly naked of leaves and two of the tomatoes are partially eaten.  

Since the caterpillars closely resemble a shriveled leaf, it was

notice the naked stalks near
the top of the plant,
ravished by the hornworm

difficult to spot them. Like the way you are searching for that bottle of nail polish that you swear you just put down on top of your dresser before getting distracted and wandering off to do whatever idea distracted you only to return to your dresser, unable to find the very bottle of nail polish you just put there even though it's sitting in plain sight and the words of both your grandmother and your mother "if it was a snake it would have bit me" echo in your head. It was kinda like that.

My grandfather used to keep quite a large garden. (My grandparents lived up the street from us.) I hated gardening when I was a child. It was hot, sticky work, getting your hands dirty and your skin prickled by handling the weeds. I avoided it as a result. 

I have distinct memories of my mother giving me a "list" of specific items to get from PapPap's garden and me walking up our long driveway to his garden and picking tomatoes, beans, and corn that we ate for dinner that very night.  One of my jobs was to shuck the corn or to snap the ends off the green beans. Incidentally, that's a job I've passed onto my kids whenever I buy fresh corn on the cob or green beans from the farmer's market.

Since the summer solstice, however, the sun has shifted just enough so that my deck doesn't get quite enough sunlight. Sadly, I don't think these lovely tomato babies will ripen. I don't like fried green tomatoes.

One of my tomato babies.