The Rural Life

Tomatoes

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By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: August 6, 2006

I am finally beginning to understand tomatoes. At least that’s how it feels this year. I’ve tried growing them in page-wire cages and in stiff wire cones. One year I simply gave up and let the plants flop along the ground, the way they seem to want to do. The past few years I’ve grown them on seven-foot stakes, a single stalk working its way upward. I’ve skipped most of the modern tomato technologies: red plastic mulch and water-filled girdles that keep young plants from freezing. I don’t even try to raise the seedlings myself. A friend raises them for me — heirlooms mostly. I put them in the ground around Memorial Day and wait.

My tomato skills are these. I am a ruthless pincher. Off go the suckers — sprouting in the joint between branch and stem — and off goes any branch that looks as if it’s going into business for itself. Last week, several of the plants topped out their poles, and I pinched back the growing tips as if to say: “Vegetation is over. Time to ripen.” I wash my hands and the water is green.

My other skill is tying up tomatoes. A couple of years ago I found the knot I needed — a loose, open overhand knot around the stem and then a square knot around the stake, the whole thing shaped like an 8. I use baling twine, of which we have an infinite supply, cut into forearm lengths.

As skills go in this complicated world, these are as simple as they come. And yet I can’t explain how gratifying they are, how much pleasure it gives me to examine each stem for suckers, to know that I’ve really looked those tomatoes over. As I tie up the stalks, I think about the storms that blow through this time of year — bruising rain, sudden downdrafts — and it’s good to know that the tomatoes, at least, are safely moored. I know there’s a harvest somewhere in my calculations. I see that other people’s vines have ripe tomatoes on them. But earliness isn’t everything.

I wish I could say that I turn from the tomatoes to the squash and the sweet corn and the turnips and the beans. But it hasn’t been that kind of year. Beyond the tomato patch is a forest of weeds, apart from a few sad rows of radishes and some patches of mesclun. I have a long list of excuses: caterpillars in May and June, the steady rain, a surprising reinforcement of woodchucks. Once again, this fall, I will reorganize, put up a stout wire fence, and lay out next spring in advance.

But the truth is that I would rather grow tomatoes than anything else. Pathogens may spring from the soil in a hard rain onto the lower leaves, corrupting them, but the tomato stalk pushes upward, rampant, always probing outward, feeling its way, almost disregarding the fruit it was meant to bear.