Tomato Pandemic Poem

People dealt with the pandemic in all kinds of ways. My fellow farmer seems to have coped with tomatoes.

Normally tomato-besotted, my fellow got even more crazy last winter at seed-ordering time, browsing through various catalogs: Johnny's, Fedco, Turtle Tree Seed, Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds,Totally Tomatoes, Victory Seeds, and the “Sometimes Nice People Give Us Samples from Their Travels” collection, which we store in our backroom.

We plant nearly all our tomatoes in our greenhouses, where we have room for 300 or so standard and heirloom slicers. Standard varieties are the round, red, regular ol' tomatoes. We always plant a lot of our stand-by, Jetstar, plus maybe one or two other varieties we are trialling.

This year, though, we have Jetstar, Super Fantastic, Caiman, Big Juicy, Rockingham, Galahad, Momotaro, Damsel, Arbason, Fenda, Bay State, and Buffalo Steak.

When it came to heirloom (and heirloom-standard cross) tomatoes, in all their shades of red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, black, green, white, rainbow; and all their shapes, round, oval, heart, pear, wrinkly, folded, lumpy, bumpy; and all their sizes, from giant to tiny, my fellow outdid himself. He ordered so many interesting kinds that we could only plant one or two seeds of each variety.

Now most farmers would classify all these tomatoes by type, color, variety, place of origin, size, etc., falling back perhaps on alphabetical order. However, this farmer is also a writer, and thus here is my heirloom tomato list, organized by the nice sounds of their names.

In fact, this list could be, according to my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (edited by Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, and published in 1993), a found poem. A found poem “is the presentation of something 'found' in the environment – a piece of expository prose, a snatch of poetry or dramatic dialogue, a newspaper page, document, map, painting, photograph, etc. – as a lineated text and hence a poem,” or the “verbal equivalent of a collage” (423).

(Oh, hee hee, I never thought I could work that fine book into my farming and sustainability column! Ah, poetry . . . another good way to deal with the pandemic.)

Here is my found poem (which technically isn't just heirloom varieties, as my farmer fellow will be sure to point out when he reads this, but also includes some of those heirloom-standard crosses, those heirloomish hybrids):

Tiffin Mennonite, Thorburn's Terra-Cotta, Oxheart, Linnie's Oxheart,
Fanto Rommo, Cosmonaut Volkov, Cour di Bue, Zapotec,
Anais Noire, Giroc, Jerusalem, Danko, Carmello, Marmara,
Summer Sweetheart, Stump of the World, Grandma's Pick, Gold Medal, Country Taste,
Mushroom Basket (my fellow's goal is to put some of our exciting new crop of log-growm shiitake and oyster mushrooms inside one of these tomatoes!),
Polish Giant, Podor, Prue, Pantono Romanesco, Pomodoro, Santo Palo, Portuguese Ibrido,
Precious, Honey, Kimberton Yellow (maybe you remember our “Kimberton Black,” our scratchy-bitey precious-honey black kitty?),
Chef's Choice Yellow, Chef's Choice Bi-Color, Chef's Choice Black, Chef's Choice Pink,
Tasty Pink, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye, Pink Accordion (it's all folded up!),
Pink Brandywine, Yellow Brandywine, Purple Brandy, Big Brandy, Brandywise, Black Brandywine,
Vintage Wine, Genuwine, (for my brother-in-law who owns a wine shop, plus my fellow is making wine for the first time this summer),
Fried Green, Aunt Ruby's German Green,
Cherokee Green, Cherokee Carbon, Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Purple Heart,
Pruden's Purple, Paul Robeson, Black Prince, African Queen, Great White, White Tomesol, White Beauty, Black Beauty,
Black Pear, Italian Red Pear, Italian Heirloom,
Red Rose, Red Sausage (weird, huh?),
Flamme, Sart Roloise (”stunning color of a stained glass masterpiece” says the seed packet),
and Believe it or Not.

Let us not forget our 50 paste/plum tomatoes: Juliet, Large Oval, Giant Garden Paste, Golden Rave, Mr Fumarole, Cuore de Toro.

Or our 100 to 150 cherry tomatoes: we have almost all Sungold, except for a few Isis and Unicorn, which came as free packets from the seed catalogs. Plus we have one more cherry tomato plant: I have a fondness for Sunpeach, a pink variety, and when I looked in last year's old packet, I found a single seed. I planted my one seed. It sprouted! I planted the seedling in the greenhouse. It lived! Now it's bearing fruit (and I must admit to eating them all myself!).

Soon all these tomatoes will be bearing fruit, we hope. We surely won't eat them all ourselves, and my fellow farmer might even be able to tell you which variety is which!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 28 - Aug 3, 2021

The Tomato Grafting Revolution

One day several years ago my farming fellow came back from his seed-saving group, saying, “Yeah, it was great! There were all these people growing their great great great grandmothers' heirloom open pollinated really rare varieties of corn and beans!”

“What did you say you were growing?” I asked him.

“I said I was grafting tomatoes! They all looked at me like I'm nuts!”

I thought my fellow was a little nuts myself, when he first talked about grafting tomatoes. People graft fruit trees, I said knowingly, not tomatoes.

“Look at this! It's fantastic!” was his answer. He showed a me a video clip of a hand, a razor blade, and two innocent tomato plants, each being sliced in half. Then the bottom of one was stuck to the top of the other, with the help of a silicone clip.

“Isn't that great?” he said. “I can't wait to try this!”

“But why?” I said. “It's so artificial, it's so forced, it's so not sustainable. And it's so not groovy!”

“I know,” he said enthusiastically, “but it doubles production, and the whole greenhouse is full of propane heaters and miles of plastic and irrigation and fans and everything else. It's all crazy and non-groovy. But since we have all these resources concentrated in this one area, we might as well get good production. That's a kind of sustainibility, too. And it's fantaaaastic production! Look at this! The plants are twice as big! Twice as many tomatoes!”

“But do we want twice as many tomatoes?”

“Yes!” said my fellow farmer.

Oh, he does love tomatoes, my fellow. Every year he grows a trillion different varieties, pink, yellow, white, purple, green, black, orange, and even red. He was ecstatic the year we were finally able to put all our tomatoes under cover, thanks to the addition of two new hoophouses. The outside, or “field” tomatoes, tasted mighty good, but they didn't always look so pretty. Now our tomatoes taste and look good, in the highly protected hoophouse environment.

The next big tomato step, after the hoophouse revolution, was the grafting revolution. My fellow plunged in, armed with a razor blade and a little pair of scissors. He sliced and trimmed and clipped, joining a sturdy Central American tomato root, highly tolerant of greenhouse conditions, to whatever heirloom or hybrid variety he was most enamored with at the moment. He tucked the tender grafties into the hospital, a darkened area under one of our propagation tables, for three days, misting them carefully twice a day. Then voila! There emerged the first batch of grafted tomatoes, each little plant either thoroughly dead or amazingly alive.

We transplanted the grafties carefully into our hoophouse beds, and soon they took off, and off, and off. They burst out of their silicone clips and grew and grew, twice the size of their non-grafted neighbors. We were in awe. We gazed high, at the hoophouse trusses, where the tomatoes were curling their leaves and twining their stems. That year was the first that my fellow had to start climbing a ladder to harvest tomatoes.

Ever since, my fellow has grafted, gazed in awe, and climbed the ladder. Over the years, he's worked his way through various grafting errors: plants too little, plants too big, plants in hospital too long, plants in hospital not long enough, plants too wet, plants too dry. Then one year my fellow had another brilliant idea: “Hey! How about grafting some cherry tomatoes?”

“Gee, I don't know,” I answered. “We've got an awful lot of cherry tomatoes already. It takes us three hours at a time, the two of us, just to pick them.”

“I'm going to try, just a couple. It'll be great. The plants will be huge!”

My fellow was right again. The plants were huge. They were monstrous. They were impenetrable. We would tunnel in, trying to reach the trillion before the overripening, the splitting, and then the rotting. We would tunnel in, and come out gasping for air.

“Never again,” I said. “Never again.”

“Never again,” agreed my fellow, “Never again.”

Now we laugh about it, as we spend our companionable three hours picking the lovely non-grafted cherry tomatoes twice a week together.

“Remember that year you grafted the cherry tomatoes?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hee hee hee. That was a big mistake.”

“Hee hee hee,” I say. “That was funny. Remember how mad I used to get? I'd come out of there with all these leaves and cherry tomatoes caught on my head. I hated wasting all those tomatoes we couldn't reach.”

“Yeah,” he says again. “That makes this kind of picking seem easy, doesn't it?”

“It sure does,” I say.

“But it's a good thing I graft the big tomatoes,” he adds quickly. “Don't you think?”

“I sure do, “ I say. “I guess you're not completely nuts after all. You're more like completely tomatoes!”
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 31 -- Sept 6, 2016