Summer’s tomatoes and side-ditch lilies

By Doug Page | Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 10:49 AM

We stand on the cusp of the dog days of summer.

It’s just hot enough to remind us that summer can be unkind. But at 7 a.m., it’s just cool enough on the back porch to remember that some aspects of living are easy.

The corn is elephant-eye high and tasseled. The uniform rows of green hide the once flat desolation of the winter fields.

All the work of spring is blooming. Tomatoes hang green heavy, beginning their magical transformation to deep, delicious red.

Outside of the corn and tomatoes, my interest is limited. Corn on the cob, iced tea, and a tomato, mayo and white-bread sandwich are a meal for the mouth that feeds the soul.

The lightning bugs are mostly gone. But it must have been a good year for rabbits. They seem everywhere along the side ditches, hopping off the pavement in haste at the sound of approaching vehicles.

Given the good price for corn, many farmers are planting as much as they can. The space between the side ditches and the edge of the corn gets smaller and smaller. The bunnies don’t have a lot of space in which to live.

This time of year, however, that space is beautiful, filled with the last of the day lily blooms, the blue and white wildflowers. (I’ll call them wildflowers rather than weeds. If they were growing in the wife’s flower garden, they most certainly would be weeds.) Because I work out of my little car, I get to see a lot of side ditches, wildflowers, corn, beans and bunnies.

I get to be a passing inspector of gardens. It can be disheartening.

In garden after garden, the tomatoes are flourishing into succulent ripeness. My modest plant on the back porch just drinks water, eats plant food and grows taller. The five small tomatoes don’t appear to be gaining any circumference. They remain a stubborn green.

I bemoaned my plant’s lack of progress to Jim Fulton of Fulton Farms one weekend.

“Tomatoes,” he laughed, “should be in the ground, not a pot.”

There was a method to my single tomato plant madness.

In the past, I have relied on the kindness of friends for my fresh tomatoes.

They have been all too kind.

There were never enough mouths in the family to eat all of the bounty from the gardens of friends. Which meant it was up to us to re-gift the produce before it went bad and ended up in the composter.

This year I could say with a straight face: No thanks. I’m growing my own.

Growing it in a pot on the second-story balcony cuts down on the weeding and protects the plant from the marauding of critters.

And by growing but a single plant, I thought I would never face the problem of too many tomatoes.

Alas, I thought. Which always ends badly. I should have asked an expert. The wife, for example.

“Your tomato plant is lonely,” she said one morning. “Get it some company.”

That evening, a friend of the wife — alerted to the opportunity — harvested one of her many red basil plants, potted it and set it beside the lonely tomato.

I’m not sure how effective the addition has been. A new tomato has been added to the five, though it remains the size of a thumb nail.

The downside is I now have two plants to water. More work for a city “farmer.”

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