Growing Tomatoes

Dana Luery Shaw
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

I’ve hated tomatoes my whole life. They taste bad, they have disgusting texture, and they upset my stomach. I’m the only person in the family to turn up my nose at grandma’s lasagna, I always remove and scrape off the remains of a T before I can bite into a BLT, I can’t even do ketchup. I had always assumed that I would die without ever understanding the popularity of this mushy red beast of a fruit.

And then, on a whim, I decided to take a chance on some of the cute little heirloom tomatoes offered at the Farmer’s Market.

One month later and I’m still not sure about how to feel about this radical shift in my identity. I still don’t *love* tomatoes, but I can eat them, and even enjoy them sometimes. Taste, texture, stomach problems… somehow all have been improved by trying whatever they’re selling at the Farmer’s Market.

So I recently decided to dig into the change and buy an heirloom cherry tomato plant.

Meet Suncherry Jones, aka Jonesy, as named by @jfdubiner (on Twitter, not on Medium, sorry for the confusion)

Here’s what I have learned so far:

— They need a bigger bucket or planter or whatever than you think. You buy the plant and it’s, what, four inches tall? Six? That fucker’s going to shoot up and out fast and you won’t be able to stick it in a little eight inch pot. Go 16–24 inches or go home.

— They will, at some point, need structure. Just like us humans, tomatoes thrive when they aren’t just grasping futilely at the air and eventually collapsing under their own weight. Give em a tomato cage or a trellis or something.

— Fertilizer = a good idea. Follow the instructions on the box, which can involve mixing the tomato food into the top 6–8 inches of soil. Side note: buy gardening gloves, or your hands will smell like fertilizer for the day.

— Apparently you will need to torture them in order for them to fruit properly? The guy at the market said to underwater them when you want them to make more fruit, because then they “panic and produce babies so that they might not die.” Yikes. Haven’t tried this yet, am afraid the tomatoes will just die and that there will be no delicious babies to eat.

— Don’t let your idiot pet near this plant. The ASPCA says that tomato plants are toxic to cats, dogs, and horses, so especially if your pet has no self-control when it comes to eating poison (my cat really enjoys licking bleach), best to keep them separate. (EDIT: Fully ripened tomatoes are not toxic, though, fun fact.)

— Wait forever before you can enjoy eating more of this strange and newly tantalizing fruit. It’s been two weeks, where are my goddamn tomatoes.

Once this stupid plant makes food for me, I’ll post some recipes that they can be used in. Probably going to keep it simple to start, like a good caprese salad with some “real” mozzarella di bufala (in quotes because America doesn’t get real mozzarella because we can’t have raw milk cheeses aged under 60 days), or a quick and not-overwhelmed-with-tomatoes pasta recipe.

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