RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ANOTHER SUMMER, ANOTHER TOMATO: A TRIBUTE WORTH ITS SALT

To taste the worthiest of fruit, a truly home-grown and vine-ripened tomato, follow this simple advice. Grow your own.

It would be negligent of me not to pay my annual tribute to the tomato, the all-purpose fruit whose only known drawback is that it is too often marketed as home-grown and vine-ripened when, in fact, neither of those claims is true.

But that's not the tomato's fault, is it?

Last year I waxed poetic -- whatever that means -- about the noble tomato. If you recall, I wrote some doggerel that had difficulty finding a suitable rhyme for "tomato" other than "potato." It doesn't seem fitting to praise, in verse, a fruit often mistaken for a vegetable by referring to a tuber, if you follow my drift.

Fortunately, this year I do not feel moved by any muse to attempt anything resembling a poem about tomatoes.

So your Cheerios and toast are safe for now.

The tomato I want to honor this year is the one that is truly home-grown and vine-ripened. You would think, as many gardeners as there are, and as many gardeners who never plant just one tomato plant but always buy the plants in bulk, that there would be such an abundant supply of fresh, ripe, red, juicy tomatoes that the topic of home growing and vine ripening wouldn't even come up.

In spite of all these industrious gardeners, there are still folks -- let's call them tomato charlatans -- who take money for tomatoes that look fresh, ripe, red and juicy enough to taste like the ones you grew in the garden when you were growing up on the farm. In fact, these commercial tomatoes have the consistency of a sun-bloated cucumber and taste like papier-mache flavored with rusty water.

You might be thinking, Who knows what papier-mache flavored with rusty water tastes like?

Look, I promised no poetry this year, which leaves me with vivid literary imagery as my only tool. Please work with me here.

My wife and I have developed a source, an anonymous gardener whose name we do not know and who is contacted only by a third party, to supply us with fresh tomatoes when they are at their peak. Generally, this is from early July to September. This year, however, our supplier -- honest, this isn't a drug deal or anything -- either didn't have good luck with his hundred tomato plants, or he has found better customers. I don't think we did anything offensive, and we always paid our dealer, the third party, promptly as the tomatoes have been delivered.

Sometime in late July, we were at a garden store where leftover plants -- plants that should have been put in the ground sometime in early May -- were being sold at heavily discounted prices. There were two good-sized containers, each with a healthy tomato plant bearing green fruit. We thought, What the heck, we'll put the plants on our patio, and it will be up to them and God -- with a little water from me now and then -- to produce truly, really, honestly home-grown, vine-ripened tomatoes.

We weren't holding our breath.

So the tomato plants soaked up the sun in the afternoon and got a shot of water whenever the petunias and geraniums and nasturtiums and begonias and bougainvillea and ivy and coconut-scented geranium got theirs. Once a week, the happy plant family on the patio got its dose of joy juice, a special liquid fertilizer my wife has used successfully for years. Her theory is simple: Get the plants addicted to this fertilizer, and they'll do just about anything you want.

Lo and behold, one of the tomatoes on one of the plants turned red. When it was fully ripe, I picked it. We ate it. It was delicious. Now a couple of smaller tomatoes have ripened, and they too are salad history. The plants are blooming, and there are some small, green tomatoes coming along nicely.

Heck, this tomato-growing business is pretty simple. Next year we'll have dozens of containers with tomato plants on the patio. The petunias will have to fend for themselves. We'll have so many tomatoes that we'll start giving them away to anyone who wants them.

And there will be a huge demand for our tomatoes, because we will guarantee vine ripening and home growing. And they will be the best-tasting tomatoes you ever ate. Just wait and see.

So much for my annual tribute to tomatoes. As you can see, tomatoes rank pretty high in my food pyramid. There are only three foods that rate my column-writing devotion: tomatoes, fruitcakes and doughnuts.

Come to think of it, that IS my food pyramid. Someday I'll try to explain to you how all those other foods -- meat, grains, dairy products -- got onto the official pyramid thanks to high-priced lobbyists and crooked government bureaucrats.

For now, just be grateful for any tomato that tastes like a real tomato.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.