Sweet as
sugar and dripping with juice, it was the last of its kind, lining the kitchen
sill to mellow in the sun.
It had been
a long road to this tomato.
Last March I
first envisioned the perfect tomato.
Furloughed
due to the pandemic, I sat at my desk writing a shopping list, thinking about
the depleted contents of the fridge and the sparse shelves in the supermarket.
And that’s when I first pictured this tomato.
I saw in my
mind’s eye dozens of canning jars in my pantry, filled with the chunky red
fruit.
"There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown," wrote Alice B. Toklas.
What if we could
grow enough vegetables in our 16- by 8-foot kitchen garden to banish these
worries?
I plotted
the plot for a couple of months.
Then in May we
tilled the soil.
After
visiting three greenhouses with no success, we found a handful of tiny tomato,
cucumber and hot pepper plants at a small farm stand.
We planted them and
watered them every evening.
Back to
work, but working remotely from home, I charted their sluggish progress. Slowly,
the little plants began to flower.
One morning
in June we gazed in horror at the garden plot or what remained of it. During
the night deer had eaten all the tomato plants. Only the cucumbers and peppers survived
their rampage.
We found
another farm stand, offering a few tomato plants with the unusual name
“Mortgage Busters.”
Not taking
any chances, we fertilized and coddled the new plants that were getting a very late
start on the season.
Unbelievably,
they liked their new home and seemed to sprint overnight. We placed cages
around them.
Then we
awoke one morning, and all our work was for naught. The deer had returned for a
second helping, and this time they delicately ate all the young fruit, unable
to reach inside the cages.
This was the
final straw. My husband hired a carpenter friend who built a fence around the
kitchen garden.
Following suggestions
from a friar, we began a Mary Garden within the fence, placing a small statue
of the Mother and Child in front of a big beautiful bush of red roses. Herbs,
including rosemary, encircled the saint.
We left the
ravaged plants alone, and miraculously, they regenerated without interference. Wild
birds at the feeder nearby swooped down on the plants, keeping the insects at
bay. When the tiny fruit appeared, they were an unusual purple pinkish color.
Looking back,
we could have bought bushels of tomatoes and paid a chef to prepare them for
what it cost to fence the garden and buy all those plants.
But in the
end, our 2020 kitchen garden survived on a wing and a prayer.
