Tomato Harvest Quotes

Although nature has proven season in and season out that if the thing that is planted bears at all, it will yield more of itself, there are those who seem certain that if they plant tomato seeds, at harvest time they can reap onions.

The more beautiful world my heart knows is possible is a world with a lot more pleasure: a lot more touch, a lot more lovemaking, a lot more hugging, a lot more deep gazing into each other’s eyes, a lot more fresh-ground tortillas and just-harvested tomatoes still warm from the sun, a lot more singing, a lot more dancing, a lot more timelessness, a lot more beauty in the built environment, a lot more pristine views, a lot more water fresh from the spring. Have you ever tasted real water, springing from the earth after a twenty-year journey through the mountain? None of these pleasures is very far away. None requires any new inventions, nor the subservience of the many to the few. Yet our society is destitute of them all. Our wealth, so-called, is a veil for our poverty, a substitute for what is missing. Because it cannot meet most of our true needs, it is an addictive substitute. No amount can ever be enough. Many of us already see through the superficial substitute pleasures we are offered. They are boring to us, or even revolting. We needn’t sacrifice pleasure to reject them. We need only sacrifice the habit, deeply ingrained, of choosing a lesser pleasure over a greater. Where does this habit come from? It is an essential strand of the world of separation, because most of the tasks that we must do to keep the world-devouring machine operating do not feel very good at all. To keep doing them, we must be trained to deny pleasure.

All farms require a resident dreamer, someone to thumb through seed catalogs in the cold days of late January, imagining summer fields of squash and cucumbers, tomatoes and sunflowers. Fall harvests are the reward of winter dreams. Someone must decide where the next fence should be placed, or conceive of a clever new way to organize the market stand. On a farm, there's no shortage of little dreams needing to be dreamed.

By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants—potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, a whole slew of beans and squashes, four types of chili peppers, and chocolate, among rather a lot else—not a bad haul. It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

Harvest Time When Daddy's garden is ready it is filled with words that make me laugh when I say them -- pole beans and tomatoes, okra and corn sweet peas and sugar snaps, lettuce and squash. Who could have imagined so much color that the ground disappears and we are left walking through an autumn's worth of crazy words that beneath the magic of my grandmother's hands become side dishes.

While Mesoamericans were harvesting corn and potatoes (and avocados and tomatoes and beans and about a hundred other plants we would be desolate to be without now),

Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.

dinner. I would climb over the farmer’s fence and toss back to my father samples of the crop I was harvesting. It could be ears of corn or tomatoes or whatever was in season. That’s what you had to do to get by and put food on the table. But the farmers weren’t any too happy with our ideas about sharing in nature’s bounty. Some nights they’d be waiting for us with shotguns. Some farmer would chase me, and I’d jump over the fence and get hit in the butt with birdshot. One

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

The garden flourished that summer because Magnus's mother was determined to feed her family despite the depredations of the distant war. In the fall, there were beans and tomatoes and pickles to can, and jar after jar of applesauce. Mama's hives yielded fresh honey, and then willow skeps were winterized. The bees would not come out until the air warmed and the sun appeared.

Oh, look at that—tomatoes. Harvested by hand, from plants nurtured in perfectly tilled soil by perfectly bearded hipsters, in the land of organic milk and asshole honey, where everyone was happy and in tune with the earth, and the entire world narrowed down to slow, sustainable, and the concept du jour—local. Fuck local. I’d fucked local, and look where it got me. Angry/not angry, listening/not listening for a phone call or text, feeling/not feeling overwhelmed, confused, betrayed, and slightly . . . used?

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica.

But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of the harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke, a new apron, a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear.

You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all.

Hm? These cherry tomatoes... they've been dried. Right, Tadokoro?" "Y-yes, sir! Back home, winter can be really long. In the summer we harvest a lot of vegetables and preserve them so we can have them in winter too. Mostly by sun drying them. When I was little, I'd help with that part. That's when my Ma -um, I mean, my mother- taught me how to dry them in the oven. You cut the cherry tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with rock salt and then slowly dry them at a low temperature, around 245* F. I, um... thought they'd make a nice accent for the terrine..." "Right. Tomatoes are rich in the amino acid glutamate essential in umami. Drying them concentrates the glutamate, greatly increasing the amount of sweetness the tongue senses. In Shinomiya's case... ... his nine-vegetable terrine focused on fresh vegetables, with their bright and lively flavors. But this recette accentuates the savory deliciousness of vegetables preserved over time. Both dishes are vegetable terrines... ... but one centers on the delicacy of the fresh... ... while the other on the savory goodness of the ripe and aged. They are two completely different approaches to the same ingredient- vegetables!" "Mmm! This is the flavor that warms the soul. You can feel my darling Megumi's kindness in every bite." "For certain. If Shinomiya is the "Vegetable Magician"... ... I would say Megumi is... a modest spirit who gifts you with the bounty of nature. a Vegetable Colobuckle!" *A tiny spirit from Ainu folklore said to live under butterbur leaves* "No, that's not what she is! Megumi is a spirit who brings happiness and tastiness... a Vegetable Warashi!" *Childlike spirits from Japanese folklore said to bring good fortune* "Or perhaps she is that spirit which delivers the bounty of vegetables from the snowy north... a Vegetable Yukinoko!" *Small snow sprites* "It's not winter, so you can't call her a snow sprite!" "How come all of you are picking spirits from Japanese folklore anyway?

The time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants–potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, marrows, aubergines, avocados, a whole slew of beans and squashes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, four types of chilli pepper and chocolate, among rather a lot else–not a bad haul. It has been estimated that 60 per cent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without aubergines, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chillies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land to east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.

Servers moved among the guests with trays of hors d'oeuvres and the signature cocktail, champagne with a honey infused liqueur and a delicate spiral twist of lemon. The banquet was bursting with color and flavor- flower-sprinkled salads, savory chili roasted salmon, honey glazed ribs, just-harvested sweet corn, lush tomatoes and berries, artisan cheeses. Everything had been harvested within a fifty-mile radius of Bella Vista. The cake was exactly what Tess had requested, a gorgeous tower of sweetness. Tess offered a gracious speech as she and Dominic cut the first slices. "I've come a long way from the city girl who subsisted on Red Bull and microwave burritos," she said. "There's quite a list of people to thank for that- my wonderful mother, my grandfather and my beautiful sister who created this place of celebration. Most of all, I'm grateful to Dominic." She turned to him, offering the first piece on a yellow china plate. "You're my heart, and there is no sweeter feeling than the love we share. Not even this cake. Wait, that might be overstating it. Everyone, be sure you taste this cake. It's one of Isabel's best recipes.

Joe had always pretended indifference to flowers. He preferred fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, things to be picked and harvested, stored, dried, pickled, bottled, pulped, made into wine. But there were always flowers in his garden all thee same. Planted as if on an afterthought: dahlias, poppies, lavender, hollyhocks. Roses twined among the tomatoes. Sweet peas among the bean poles. Part of it was camouflage, of course. Part of it a lure for bees. But the truth was that Joe liked flowers, and was reluctant even to pull weeds. Jay would not have seen the rose garden if he had not known where to look. The wall against which the roses had once been trained had been partly knocked down, leaving an irregular section of brick about fifteen feet long. Greenery had shot up it, almost reaching the top, creating a dense thicket in which he hardly recognized the roses themselves. With the shears he clipped a few briars free and revealed a single large red rose almost touching the ground. "Old rose," remarked Joe, peering closer. "Best kind for cookin'. You should try makin' some rose petal jam. Champion." Jay wielded the shears again, pulling the tendrils away from the bush. He could see more rosebuds now, tight and green away from the sun. The scent from the open flower was light and earthy.

Children Are a Gift Behold, children are a gift of the LORD; the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. —PSALM 127:3 NASB     In a recent women’s Bible study, the teacher asked the group, “Did you feel loved by your parents when you were a child?” Here are some of the responses. • “A lot of pizza came to the house on Friday nights when my parents went out for the evening.” • “I got in their way. I wasn’t important to them.” • “They were too busy for me.” • “Mom didn’t have to work, but she did just so she wouldn’t have to be home with us kids.” • “I spent too much time with a babysitter.” • “Mom was too involved at the country club to spend time with me.” • “Dad took us on trips, but he played golf all the time we were away.” So many of the ladies felt they were rejected by their parents in their childhoods. There was very little love in their homes. What would your children say in response to the same question? I’m sure we all would gain insight from our children’s answers. In today’s verse we see that children are a reward (gift) from the Lord. In Hebrew, “gift” means “property—a possession.” Truly, God has loaned us His property or possessions to care for and to enjoy for a certain period of time. My Bob loves to grow vegetables in his raised-bed garden each summer. I am amazed at what it takes to get a good crop. He cultivates the soil, sows seeds, waters, fertilizes, weeds, and prunes. Raising children takes a lot of time, care, nurturing, and cultivating as well. We can’t neglect these responsibilities if we are going to produce good fruit. Left to itself, the garden—and our children—will end up weeds. Bob always has a smile on his face when he brings a big basket full of corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans into the kitchen. As the harvest is Bob’s reward, so children are parents’ rewards. Let your home be a place where its members come to be rejuvenated after a very busy time away from it. We liked to call our home the “trauma center”—a place where we could make mistakes, but also where there was healing. Perfect people didn’t reside at our address. We tried to teach that we all make mistakes and certainly aren’t always right. Quite often in our home we could hear the two

Stagger Plantings for Better Control Even in the smallest garden, an important technique for keeping the work manageable is to plant in dribs and drabs: Plant a little lettuce seed now and a little more two weeks later. Though you’ll want to plant some crops all at one time — like peppers or tomatoes — planting small batches of many crops is a good garden habit to cultivate. Whatever size garden you tend, you’ll find that staggering the planting spreads out the harvest, and much of the attention that plants need in between, too. Instead of having a 20-foot-long row of lettuce or beets to thin on a given day, you’ll have only a foot or two of seedlings to thin. Cover with plastic soil that’s not yet planted to help it warm up, or cover it with grass clippings to keep it moist and suppress weeds. Or let the weeds germinate as a short-term cover crop and then slice them off before you plant your seeds.

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It’s a way of eating that is ecologically expensive; it also tends to ignore all that’s required to produce the most delicious food.

It All Starts at Home The quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicates to children the degree to which they are valued by their parents…. When children know that they are valued, and when they truly feel valued in the deepest parts of themselves, then they feel valuable. —M. SCOTT PECK     It was a source of much aggravation to some fish to see a number of lobsters swimming backward instead of forward. So they called a meeting, and it was decided to start a class for the lobsters’ instruction. This was done, and a number of young lobsters came. (The fish had reasoned that if they started with the young lobsters, as they grew up, they would learn to swim properly.) At first they did very well, but afterward, when they returned home and saw their fathers and mothers swimming in the old way, they soon forgot their lessons. So it is with many children who are well-taught at school but drift backward because of a bad home influence. Psalm 127:1-128:4 gives us some principles for building a family in which children are confident that their parents love them. First, the psalmist addresses the foundation and protection of the home: “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain” (127:1). The protective wall surrounding a city was the very first thing to be constructed when a new city was built. The people of the Old Testament knew they needed protection from their enemies, but they were also smart enough to know that walls could be climbed over, knocked down, or broken apart. They realized that their ultimate security was the Lord standing guard over the city. Are you looking for God to help you build your home? Are you trusting the Lord to be the guard over your family? Many forces in today’s society threaten the family. In Southern California we see parents who are burning the candle at both ends to provide all the material things they think will make their families happy. We rise early and retire late, but Psalm 127:2 tells us that these efforts are futile. We are to do our best to provide for and protect our families, but we must trust first and foremost in God to take care of them. When we tend our gardens, we’re rewarded by corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans. Just as the harvest of vegetables is our reward, a God-fearing child is a parent’s reward. After parents tend to their children’s instruction in the ways of God’s wisdom and His Word, they do see the work God is

The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.* Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

My garden grows in its own good time. Every plant has its season. Lettuce comes up early and must be picked or else it will bolt. Kale gets planted late in the season because it loves the cool weather of fall. Asparagus takes years to prosper, and strawberries can take up to two seasons to provide a harvest. Frost-sensitive crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini love the sweltering, sultry heat of the depths of summer, when they propagate so passionately that the bees can barely keep up. Even though I know all of this, sometimes I can't wait to find out what's going to happen next.

Mycorrhizal fungi can increase the quality of a harvest, as the experiments with basil, strawberries, tomatoes, and wheat illustrate. They can also increase the ability of crops to compete with weeds and enhance their resistance to diseases by priming plants’ immune systems. They can make crops less susceptible to drought and heat, and more resistant to salinity and heavy metals. They even boost the ability of plants to fight off attacks from insect pests by stimulating the production of defensive chemicals. The list goes on: The literature is awash with examples of the benefits that mycorrhizal relationships provide to plants. However, putting this knowledge into practice is not always straightforward. For one thing, mycorrhizal associations don’t always increase crop yields. In some cases, they can even reduce them.

Ambling through the market, I spot baskets of purple and orange cauliflower, bundles of Swiss chard and collard greens, and crates of Honeycrisp apples and Italian prune plums. The tables at the market always feel a little schizophrenic this time of year, as piles of fat summer tomatoes rub shoulders with apples and knobby winter squash. Just as the late-summer fruits and vegetables are celebrating their last hurrah, the autumn harvest makes its timid debut, competing for the attention of market-goers who may have tired of the surfeit of corn on the cob and tomato salad, but who may not be ready to commit to six months of gourds.

At the house in Montclair, Daisy's mother had a quarter-acre patch in the backyard where she grew vegetables and flowers. From spring through summer and into the early fall, that was where she spent most of her free time, tilling the soil, planting and weeding and watering, hand-pollinating eggplants with a tiny paintbrush, or sprinkling ground-up bone meal on her roses and zinnias, to keep the ants away. Daisy would help her to put up the vegetables she'd harvested, turning cucumbers into pickles and tomatoes into marinara sauce.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

One first tastes the broth—that simmered distillation of fish bones, fennel, and tomatoes, with their hearty suggestions of Provence. One then savors the tender flakes of haddock and the briny resilience of the mussels, which have been purchased on the docks from the fisherman. One marvels at the boldness of the oranges arriving from Spain and the absinthe poured in the taverns. And all of these various impressions are somehow collected, composed, and brightened by the saffron—that essence of summer sun which, having been harvested in the hills of Greece and packed by mule to Athens, has been sailed across the Mediterranean in a felucca. In other words, with the very first spoonful one finds oneself transported to the port of Marseille—where the streets teem with sailors, thieves, and madonnas, with sunlight and summer, with languages and life.

Blessing of The Land (at Planting or Harvest) God of the Universe, You made the heavens and the earth, So we do not call our home merely “planet earth.” We call it your Creation, a Divine Mystery, a Gift from Your Most Blessed Hand. The world itself is your miracle. Bread and vegetables from earth are thus also from heaven. Help us to see in our daily bread your presence. Upon this garden May your stars rain down their blessed dust. May you send rain and sunshine upon our garden and us. Grant us the humility to touch the humus, That we might become more human. That we might mend our rift from your Creation, That we might then know the sacredness of the gift of life— That we might truly experience life from the hand of God. For you planted humanity in a garden, and began our resurrection in a garden. Our blessed memory and hope lie in a garden. Thanks be to God, Who made the world teeming with variety, Of things on the earth, above, the earth, and under the earth. Thanks be to God, For the many kinds of plants, trees, and fruits, We celebrate. For the centipedes, ants, and worms, For the mice, marmots, and bats, For the cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers We rejoice, That we find ourselves eclipsed by the magnitude Of generosity and mystery. Thanks be to God.

Roci says there were several beautiful gay couples at the tomato harvest festival—all sweaty, touching, and loving each other— and that their exuberance made her miss me.

You can buy plants and seeds that have some level of resistance to common diseases affecting those types of plants. Look for these types of abbreviations on plant tags, labels, and catalog descriptions: BCMW: Resistance to bean curly mosaic virus CMW: Resistance to cucumber mosaic virus Foc, Foc 1: Resistance to fusarium yellows PM: Resistance to powdery mildew PVY: Resistance to potato virus Y TMV: Resistance to tobacco mosaic virus ToMV: Resistance to tomato mosaic virus TSWV: Resistance to tomato spotted wilt virus V: Resistance to verticillium wilt Those are some of the most common abbreviations for the most common diseases, but it’s not an exhaustive list.

Whether you grow your own transplants or buy them, here’s what you should plant outside as transplants and what you can grow from seed. Seeds Transplants Bean Basil Carrot Broccoli Chives Brussels sprouts Cucumber Cabbage Dill Cauliflower Lettuce Celery Okra Collards Parsley Eggplant Parsnip Kale Onion Leek Pea Pepper Pumpkin Spinach Radish Swiss chard Turnip Tomato Watermelon

Plant transplants outside according to the spacing the fully grown plants will need. Pay attention to the depth of the hole, and ensure that you don’t bury the stem in the soil (except in special cases—see Growing Tip on the following page). Take the temperature of the soil to make sure it is warm enough. (The soil should be at least 60 to 65 degrees F for planting warm-weather vegetables such as tomatoes or peppers.) Before planting any transplants outside, prepare them by hardening them off. GROWING TIP Tomato plants should be planted deep. Strip off all but the top four sets of leaves. Plant the entire rest of the plant below the soil line. Tomato plants will grow roots from the stem, making them stronger and healthier. Hardening off before Planting out Vegetable transplants grown inside a greenhouse (or your house) need to be hardened off (acclimated to the change in temperature and light) before they’re planted outside. Even if you buy plants that were sitting outside at a garden center, it’s a good idea to harden them off before planting. For all you know, the plants were taken from the greenhouse, loaded on a truck, and brought to the garden center on the same day you saw them sitting outside. How to Harden Off Transplants 1. Place plants in a sheltered location such as a porch or patio for the day, and bring them in at night. Do this for three or four days. 2. Next, leave them outside all day in the protected location. Do this for about a week. Don’t forget to water while you’re doing this! 3. Finally, move the plants from the sheltered location (the porch or patio) to a more exposed location (the front sidewalk or driveway). Leave them there for three or four days. 4. Wait for a cloudy day (if possible) and plant your plants in the garden. Planting out on a cloudy day will lower the stress that the plants experience.

Certain vegetables will grow up trellises (wood, metal, or string). Certain plants need to have trellises to grow. Vegetables That Can Grow up Trellises Cucumber Pumpkin Squash Vegetables That Must Grow up Trellises or Lattices Pole bean Garden pea Vegetables That Need Stakes Eggplant Okra Pepper Vegetables That Need Cages Tomato

In the garden of my childhood my mother grew corn and asparagus, beans, zucchini, and more, but the thing I remember most is the cherry tomatoes, bushy in their cages, the leaves slightly sticky, funny smelling. My mother wore long-sleeve shirts to weed the tomatoes. I remember her plucking them off the bush, my brother and me opening our mouths like baby birds for her to pop them in. I closed my eyes to experience the exact moment my teeth pierced the smooth skin and the tomato exploded in a burst of acid sweet, the seeds slightly bitter in their jelly pouches. The sensation was so unexpected each time it happened that my eyes flew open. And there was my mother, smiling at me. That is what I remember. My mother did not smile often. We have pictures where she is smiling, me or my brother nestled on her lap. You can tell she loves us. Her body language shows it. But mostly we knew she loved us because of how hard she worked for us. Usually elsewhere. But the garden—the garden was her project. In the little time she had not devoted to work and cleaning and trying to hold her small world together, my mother grew food. My brother and I didn't help in the garden, but we were usually playing nearby. We always wanted to be nearby when she was home. I remember her letting us crawl through the dried cornstalks after the ears had been harvested. I remember running my hands through the asparagus that had been allowed to go to seed. I remember eating plums from the old tree that lived in the corner of the yard. I remember her feeding us tomatoes fresh off the vine and still warm from the sun. When I think of those tomatoes, it is not the flavor that moves me. They were shockingly sweet and tangy, but that is not what I remember the most. It is not what I yearned for. Eating cherry tomatoes meant my mother was home; it meant she was smiling at me.

It benefits a man absolutely nothing to hold on to a rotten tomato, rather it may be of more profit to bury it, for the harvest is promisingly fresh and well established.

How to describe it? One first tastes the broth - that simmered distillation of fish bones, fennel and tomatoes, with their hearty suggestions of Provence. One then savors the tender flakes of haddock and the briny resilience of the mussels, which had been purchased on the docks from the fisherman. One marvels at the boldness of the oranges arriving from Spain and the absinthe poured in the taverns. And all of these various impressions are somehow collected, composed and brightened by the saffron - that essence of summer sun, which having been harvested in the hills of Greece and packed by mule to Athens, has been sailed across the Mediterranean in a felucca. In other words, with the very first spoonful, one finds oneself transported to the port of Marseille – where the streets teem with sailors, thieves and Madonnas, with sunlight and summer, with languages and life.