The End of the Harvest

Okay, relax; this'll be the last time I write about tomatoes. Don't want you folks to start cyberly throwing rotten ones my way. Besides, I got a lot of world-shaking stuff that, in due time, I want to write about--like maybe rutabagas.

In Long Island’s Sunday Newsday, (yep, where the fictional Ray Barone writes a sports column) a Garden columnist wrote how badly the home grown tomato crop was this summer. Since I, personally, had a great yield I thought I’d write her—I don’t know whether I wrote it to enlighten my fellow Long Islanders or just to rub it in.

Dear Irene,

I read your piece in Sunday’s Newsday, “Tomatoes a bunch of lemons.” I’m writing to tell you that I had an enormous harvest of Early Girl tomatoes.

I’ve only planted tomatoes twice—once last year and once this year. Last year it was Patio tomatoes, in which I had a reasonable yield considering I used only four large pots. This year I planted ten Early Girl plants which yielded something in the neighborhood of 500 tomatoes—maybe 90 percent of them unblemished

It could be that I didn’t know what I was doing, (beginner’s luck.) I used Root Blast in the soil, and also fertilized about every ten days. The garden area amounted to some forty square feet of land. The plants grew six feet high—I measured. I live in Oceanside with a backyard with no imposing trees, and facing south.

Besides supplying and re-supplying some neighbors—who were getting tired of thinking of ways to say “thank you”--my wife and I ate an awful lot of tomatoes and also brewed up four gallons of tomato sauce. I currently have roughly 100 tomatoes sitting in my kitchen with nothing to do.

Yours in cornicopian splendor,

Rich