Once you’ve had homegrown, no store-bought tomato will do
No matter what else is growing in a Kansas vegetable garden, tomatoes will always be the centerpiece. For many people, tomatoes are the reason to have a garden. All the other veggies are just the supporting cast.
Try to imagine people across America throwing their backs into the labor of a garden if the primary purpose were growing cabbage.
Even people who don’t plant an actual garden may tuck a half-dozen tomato plants into the corner of the backyard or try to grow them in planters on the patio. Again, we don’t do this with other crops.
The reason the tomato incites such passion is fairly straightforward. There’s nothing quite as tasty as a vine-ripened tomato, and the only way to get one is to grow it yourself or buy it from a local grower.
Note the emphasis on local. Any tomato that travels any distance is picked early, before its flesh softens and the flavor peaks, in order to withstand the rigors of shipping. This is the main rap on grocery store tomatoes.
The downside of homegrown tomatoes is that they ruin you for any other tomatoes, including hothouse. Once you’ve eaten a sun-ripened, picked-at-its-prime tomato, all other tomatoes will forever more be low-quality knockoffs.
As I’ve talked to people about growing tomatoes, I have learned that many gardeners have special strategies for increasing yield, fertilizing, mulching, staking, watering, warding off insects and so forth.
Some people pinch suckers, some don’t. Suckers are the leaves that pop out at the intersection of stems on the plant. Some people say pinching them increases the yield from the main plant.
Other people have tactics to increase pollination. A couple of years ago, I visited the garden of Allen Fowler in Leavenworth County. He ran a wire through a row of tomato cages and gave it a jostle once a day to help nudge the pollination process along.
If you have special tomato tricks, superstitions or advice that you’d like to share with fellow enthusiasts, let me know.
In last week’s column, I mentioned that rabbits had been munching on my bean plants. Disregard the suggestion that a fake snake placed strategically in the garden might frighten away a hungry rabbit.
I positioned a large, lifelike rubber bull snake alongside my beans and found that rabbits had returned to eat the plants closest to the snake. I’m sure the rabbits had a good laugh at my expense.
A reader did call to say that I had left blood meal off the list of rabbit repellents. Blood meal is a nitrogen fertilizer that can be sprinkled near plants that are attractive to rabbits. Be sure to use it sparingly and according to package directions. An excessive dose of nitrogen could give you leafy, bright green plants with low yields.
In response to a recent column about anti-okra attitudes north of the Mason-Dixon line, Barbara Caruthers offered an anecdote about her family’s move to Baldwin from Oklahoma in 1935. When her father put in his first Kansas garden, people who peered over the fence had never seen okra before, and his garden became a local conversation piece.
Barbara dredges her okra in flour or cornmeal, seasoned with salt and pepper, and fries it in bacon fat.