I absolutely love home-grown tomatoes - they have a pungent. slightly rot-y smell (but pleasant all the same) and a rich earthiness to their taste, like they've been sprayed with a superfine mist of loamy dirt. Even the tastiest ones from a store are no match for home-grown, as they are missing those extra sensory pleasures.
It has been about 7 or 8 years since I'd last had tomato plants, which I remember as being a great success. There had been bushels and bushels of plump, bright cherry tomatoes, which had amply supported my caprese salad obsession that summer.
Aromatic goodness in a perfectly formed globe.
I was keen to repeat that success and had vivid dreams (both waking and asleep) in which pert tomatoes, creamy fresh mozzarella and succulent basil leaves frolicked in a kiddie pool of EVOO and balsamic.
So six months ago, I bought a few packets of tomato seeds and a seed starter kit. The kit consisted of cute little peat moss pods in a tray with a clear plastic cover. Kind of like an incubator for plants.
I placed 100+ seeds in the pods, then very carefully watered and tended them. When the little shoots sprang up, I thinned those, put them in little pots and made them more hardy before subjecting them to the cruel outdoors. (Not so cruel this year - it's been a spectacular summer!)
They grew. They grew some more. And then some more. They all had to be re-potted in much bigger pots (with thanks to my daughter and her NY friends.) And they just kept growing.
EXCEPT they didn't seem to want to grow actual tomatoes.
Turns out they weren't beckoning me in those dreams - they were taunting me.
My plants were enormous (evidence here):
My crop, not so much... Herewith my harvest to date (these ones are supposed to be orange... I think):
Yet tonight I had a fabulous caprese salad for dinner. With home-grown tomatoes that were pungent and misty/dirty and cheerfully red and absolutely perfect!
No, no - of course they weren't mine.
Our friends (of > 30 years - can you believe that? How old are we?!) came over last week and brought a lovely little gossamer bag of the fruits of their tomato plant labours. So fine. So tasty.
AND she told me her secret. No, it's not the potting soil, the type of tomato, or the position in the sun.
Turns out that Costco is the secret. It's where to go to buy thriving, strong tomato plants that will produce tons of tomatoes without even trying.
So next year, I'll be first in line at Costco to buy some plants. And maybe I'll use my special plant incubator to grow some sort of cash crop instead. You know, like kale, or quinoa, or something else that would sell well on the West Coast...
And this year? Well, I trimmed my plants back to just the stalks with fruit on them (all very green and hard, of course) in hopes that I can get them to stop growing taller and focus on the fruit!
Even 2 or 3 more edible tomatoes and I could at least make a sandwich.
