Homegrown Tomatoes Thomas L. Arnow (bio) Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes,What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes?Only two things that money can't buy:That's true love & homegrown tomatoes. Song "Homegrown Tomatoes," lyrics by Guy Clark Gardening took up a great part of my parents' lives. They kept a huge plot near the house in Ann Arbor. Burpee catalogs and little envelopes with pictures of plants on the front and seed inside always lay around the house. Consuming food interested me more than creating it, but I did help out some in the garden. My sister Marcella, however, caught a severe case of the gardening bug. When living in New York, she grew a few things on a tiny bit of land behind her apartment in Brooklyn. After moving to England, she got an allotment (a plot of land rented out by local governments to gardeners and wannabes) and kept it to the end of her days. My parents' garden grew a good part of the merchandise in a produce store with the exception of items like avocados, which require a warmer climate than ours. Peas, string beans, green peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, cabbage, peas, and Brussels sprouts grew their edible parts above ground: potatoes, onions, and carrots, below. Beets did both: the dark purplish root below, and, above ground, the stems and leaves, or greens, which Mama boiled. Potatoes required the most work to harvest as the roots had to be dug up and the potatoes separated out of the dirt and washed. Leaving the plant a long time to mature produced large ones for baking. Allowing a shorter time gave small, "new potatoes," finer and tastier. The gardener's prize is often tomatoes. As the song goes, "money can't buy homegrown" ones. Many store-bought tomatoes, picked green and firm enough for long-distance transportation, taste like cardboard. Ethylene gas in the trucks stimulates ripening but cannot match the natural process. I learned this long after leaving Michigan, doing computer work at the San Antonio Produce Market. My parents, of course, grew a [End Page 37] row or two of them, a variety called "beefsteak," because of their large size and blood-red color. They planted rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries east of the main garden, on the other side of the driveway from the garage. I thought of these as the strange group: rhubarb has poisonous leaves and edible stalks, sour enough to pucker one's lips. Mama boiled it with sugar and made it into pies, which tasted like nothing else in the world. Garrison Keillor fans know his skit in which rhubarb pie "removes the taste of shame and humiliation." The joke would not work with apple, cherry, or blueberry ones, but I would be hard pressed to explain why not. We grew asparagus spears, which are chopped off and boiled. If you forget to cut them, the plants grow up into unrecognizable scrawny bushes. Our strawberries grew like weeds, sending out horizontal runners, which popped up as new plants around the original ones. Sad to say, real weeds tended to choke them so the patch required constant attention. I savored everything except hot peppers and squash, which Mama pronounced as "squersh." (It rhymed with the "cherch" syllable of cherchez la femme, as Americans pronounce it.) They grew acorn squash and yellow varieties: the first resembling a ribbed melon more than an acorn, the second named for its color—neither of which would I touch. The smell and even the name bothered me. Mama cut the acorn ones in half and baked them with brown sugar. She sliced and boiled the yellow ones. At meals Dad would often say, "You don't know what you're missing," but I knew exactly what I was missing. I ate none of this stuff until adulthood when I stumbled on Mexican calabacitas cooked with tomato sauces and later their Italian cousins, zucchini. Dad grew little green peppers hot enough to sting my fingers. Brushing one with a finger and touching the finger to your lips would burn. I now associate these with Mexican and regional Chinese food. I never understood my parents' love for these. I...
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Jul 26, 2013
Ying Chiu Kai + 1
Open Access
