You Bet Your Garden Guide to Growing Great Tomatoes, Second Edition. Mike McGrath

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      Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be a gardener (or Italian) has to grow his own fresh, vine-ripened summer tomatoes. Resistance is futile, so you might as well accept the inevitable and start staggering around the garden getting it ready for you to put your tomatoes in nice and early this season (that way you might end up with some actual ripe ones before hard frost comes a-knocking).

      Like other things you might possibly have no actual interest in achieving and/or live in abject fear of (like climbing a big frozen mountain or buying a minivan), if you claim the gardening mantle, you must grow tomatoes “because they are there.” Well, actually they aren’t there yet. But they sure will be there once you get growing, won’t they? You hope.

      Anyway, there are lots of neat actual reasons why you should grow your own tomatoes.

      Here are just a few:

       All of the tomatoes for sale in grocery stores are genetically engineered with DNA taken from Alex Trebek, Wink Martindale, Whoopi Goldberg, Pat Sajak, or some other game-show type when he wasn’t paying attention.

       You can’t afford a boat, but still have a desperate need to show your neighbors you know how to foolishly waste your time and money in a really pointless manner.

       They’re easier to grow than watermelons…

       …and it’s a loteasier to tell when they’re ripe.

       Most other summertime endeavors have a much higher risk of death and/or dismemberment.

      Everyone grows their tomatoes in they live in Arizona, southern Texas, or some other place so hot they have to grow their tomatoes over the winter and live in deep holes in the sand all summer to escape the heat.

      Cupid

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      The lady’s name is Cupid. Pretty cute, eh? But is the fruit of this romantically named variety meant to look like a little Valentine heart? Or the part of everyone’s favorite cherub archer’s anatomy you see as he’s flying away from you?

       You’ll have a handy excuse for avoiding those treacherous family reunion picnics, mosquito- and blackfly-infested hikes, frolics in freezing cold ocean waves, and other festive seasonal outings you’d be dragged to if you couldn’t say, ”Gee, I’d love to go, but I performed a biodynamic copper flange pruning on my tomato plants last night, and I have to stay here and spray them with compost tea that was fermented in a ram’s horn under a full moon, or the pistils won’t be firm.”

       You’ll be able to throw around gardening terms like “pistil” and “compost tea” without being laughed at…maybe.

       There’s probably something even more tedious you’d have to do inside the house if you didn’t have the tomatoes to herd.

       You’ll have a great reason (OK, “excuse”, but it’s your word against theirs) to buy, rent, or borrow a big tiller and thus use a really noisy, dangerous piece of gasoline-powered equipment.

       You can wait until those annoying neighbors (oh, come on—you know exactly who I mean) have company over in their oh-so-perfect backyard to fire up that really noisy piece of power equipment.

       You’ll be able to cut the family food bill by a good thirty or forty dollars a year—while spending less than the cost of a new car to grow your own tomatoes!

       When your kids complain that they’re bored for the 368th time during the summer (and school’s only been out for a month), you can say, “Well, you could always weed the tomatoes.”

      But seriously, folks, there is one big, overwhelming reason you really should grow your own tomatoes:

      1) There is honestly nothing that can compare to the taste of a fresh, vine-ripened tomato, plucked at the perfect peak of sweetness and eaten warm and sugary, tart and juicy, right there in the garden as you make a big mess all over your shirt.

      2) If you actually get good at this (and you can—I grow great tomatoes just about every season, and I barely have opposable thumbs), you’ll have access to the ultimate summertime bragging right: “Oh, and would you like a slice of fresh tomato on that? Let me go out and pick a nice one for you.”

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      3) If you get really good at it, you can go for the gold: Having ripe, red tomatoes conspicuously hanging on your plants days before that pain-in-the-butt gardener down the block who’s been showing off for years.

      4) And then nirvana: Knocking on that gardener’s door with a bag of ripe tomatoes while his first love apples are still green and saying, “Here—I noticed your plants don’t seem to be doing very well this year, and we’ve had more than we can eat for weeks now…”

      5) Start your own tomatoes from seed, and you can grow (and share and savor and really brag about) wonderful varieties that you just can’t find already started for you at the garden center, much less the supermarket, like Tigerella, Brandywine, Big Rainbow, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter…

      Well, yes, that’s actually five reasons. And yes, I did begin by writing that “there is one big overwhelming reason