Of tomato blossoms and other blooms

If you're not particularly interested in gardening -- flowers or edibles -- you might want to go ahead and skip right to the comics. No need wasting your precious Wheaties moment on a topic you dislike.

I am what you might call a reluctant gardener. Gardening reminds me too much of my childhood on the farm, which had a milk cow, which is why your are reading -- if you're still with me -- this column. Had it not been for Lulu the milk cow I might at this very moment be looking to the sky to see if it's OK to mow hay or plant corn, wondering all the while if we're going to have too much rain or a drought, and worrying about the price of hogs and the cost of fertilizer, and worrying if the old tractor will make it another year.

Well, you can quickly see that the life of a newspaper editor is much simpler than juggling farm chores while stretching a barbed-wire tightrope as you're walking on it. Barefoot. And probably uphill.

One thing I've retained from my days on the farm is a love of working outdoors, which is not something newspaper editors ordinarily do. So I piddle in the yard with flowers and shrubs and, occasionally, tomato plants.

Many of you know from previous years that I firmly believe there is no such thing as too many tomatoes. Those of you who plant 60 tomato plants every spring and then wonder what to do with all those ripe tomatoes have learned that I willingly accept all donations.

A couple of summers ago I planted four tomato plants outside our bedroom window where we could watch the ripening progress from bloom to green to red. We had a few good tomatoes, but I was careless about tending the vines, and the rest of the summer crop was pretty much a bust.

I didn't plant any tomatoes last year, thinking my overindustrious friends and acquaintances would show up at my door with bags and boxes full of juicy tomatoes. Indeed, some of them did, but not in the droves I anticipated.

This year I created a tomato garden using four good-sized pots left over from previous seasons of flowering plants. The pots had been stored, along with all their cousins, under the magnolia tree which also shades the closest thing we have to a compost pile, which consists mainly of plants past their prime that need a final resting place.

I put eight tomato plants in the four pots -- you do the math -- and contrived a system of wire plant props and heavy twine going up to galvanized nails in the eave of the house in front of the patio door to the family room. My thinking here was we could watch the tomatoes develop from our recliners while the plants offered some modest shade from the early morning sun.

Older son in Boston, who produced so many plants from his tomato vines last year that he invited hordes of friends to special dinners featuring nearly all-tomato menus, suggested I give my plants proper attention, including removing any of the sucker limbs that tomato plants are prone to produce.

All the effort appears to be paying off. So far. The plants are in their second round of blooming, and the first blooms have turned into green tomatoes that grow a little fatter each day.

The prospect of home-grown tomatoes has our mouths watering, even though it's doubtful they will be ready to eat by the Fourth of July, my target.

But when my wife let out a shriek of delight the other evening as she looked out the kitchen window, it wasn't because of the tomato crop. Instead, she spotted the first blossom in the nasturtium bed a few feet in front on the tomato plants. I could barely see it and had to go outside to confirm it was truly a bloom. I shouldn't have doubted. In the fall my wife can spot an isolated vine of wild bittersweet a hundred yards off the highway while traveling 70 mph.

All in all, it's a good week when the first spot of color materializes on the nasturtiums. It's like an omen of good things to come.

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