The Red Horde

Remember the first tomato from your garden this summer?  That first, bright red beefsteak that you picked, and lovingly carried into the house with much pomp and ceremony.  You and your family admired it, walking around it to gaze upon it in its entirety, any blemish excused because it was The First Tomato of the Year.

By now, there are so many tomatoes in your refrigerator and on your windowsills and filling baskets on your kitchen island that you don't even give one a second glance.  At this point, you pitch into the compost any tomato with fewer blemishes than that First One had.

How can one little vegetable pack that you bought in May produce so many tomatoes?  Heck, at this point in the year, if you pick 4 one evening and set them on your kitchen counter, you will come down in the morning to find 8.  These things aren't tomatoes, they are rabbitomatoes.  Yeah, they'll sit there on your counter and look all innocent as if nothing happened during the night, but obviously these aren't better boys and early girls, they are bad boys and easy girls.

And don't try that ploy of giving them to your neighbor with no garden.  Your neighbor has received so many from all the other people she knows with gardens that she has tomatoes multiplying on her kitchen counter, too.  Don't bother taking them into work, either, because everyone there is trying to dump their tomatoes, as well.

Of course, you could do something exotic such as make tomato juice and peel and puree and sweat for four hours at which point you will have bottled 8 ounces of the stuff.  You can go to the store and buy half a gallon for about three bucks.  Counting labor, your tomato juice has the equivlalent value of some rare vintage Chardonnay.   And whose going to clean the kitchen, now?  Those four buckets of tomatoes still in the garage?  Not likely.

Furthermore, tomatoes obviously destroy memory cells.  Otherwise, there is no explaining the fact that next May we will again rush to plant another crop, and count down the days until the First Tomato of the Year appears once more, wonderfully oblivious of the red horde to come.

Comments

[Melissa Dodge]

LOL! What, are you hiding behind my giant cactus and spying on Charlie's tomato harvest?? At my house the Red Horde has been joined by the dreaded Yellow Squash Invasion. I think those phantom noises I hear at night are actually the sounds of a vegetable Guitar Hero tournament going on in my den. And to think that most of our garden was wiped out by hail too! Just a warning----if Bob Lanham approaches you with a couple of seemingly measly cherry tomato plants--run the other way--fast!