Take cover, tomatoes, it’s cold tonight ~ September 11, 1986

David Heiller

The tomatoes are testing fate, and testing our patience, just as they have all summer.

All right, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on them. Our first 24 transplants were cut down in their youth by a killer frost on June first. I discovered them at 3 a.m. gasping in the grips of that silent killer two months and 11 days ago. We put new transplants in that same week, and they’ve been testing fate ever since.

A tiny portion of the tomatoes
 I have processed.

Planting tomatoes in Birch Creek Township is always a gamble, not matter when the frost says goodbye in the spring, and says hello in the fall. You keep an ear cocked to the radio for frost warnings this time of year, the way British listened for the Luftwaffe in the fall of 1940.

Our first frost this fall came on August 27. I covered the tomatoes with every spare blanket and piece of plastic I could find. I even tried to take the quilt from the baby’s crib, but Cindy drew the line there. Even the tomatoes are not that important, she said. I guess she’s right.

Since then, we’ve had three more frosts, the latest coming on Saturday. The cold night left a quarter-inch skin of ice on the water in the wheelbarrow by the garden Sunday morning. But the tomatoes dozed through the ordeal, warm under their coverings.

I’m not sure all this covering and uncovering is worth the trouble. We must have a thousand tomatoes on those 24 plants. But their sizes range from a large chicken egg to a ping pong ball. They are hard, and very, very green. When we see a glimmer of flush, we snatch them up and carry them gently under our arms like baby chicks, into the house to ripen. Cindy checks them twice a day, but I’m not so fussy and go out only once.

The slugs seem to be checking them too, because every other one that starts to ripen has a hole bored into it. A lot of fat, smiling slugs are hanging out in the tomato beds, watching and waiting. The tomatoes might be too frightened to ripen.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to live in a climate that doesn’t get a frost in August, where you can actually see red tomatoes on the vine. When I went to my hometown in southeastern Minnesota three weeks ago, I saw some plants that I didn’t recognize at first. A lot of the leaves were gone, and they were drooping with red fruit. Quite a few lay on the ground even. At first I thought it was some exotic imported mango from the tropics. But looking closer, I saw that they were tomatoes. Then I remembered from my childhood, actually seeing tomatoes ripen, enough that they fall and rot on the ground. And the gardeners there have a more serene look. Their smile says, “What’s a few tomatoes?” It’s a self confidence you seldom find here. They’ve never heard of a frost warning. “Why would anybody be afraid of frost?” they ask, while eating a tomato.

Not all garden varieties are as nervous as tomatoes up here. Some do quite nicely, thank you. We pulled a beet from the ground Sunday that weighed one pound, 15 ounces. We ate the whole thing for supper at one sitting. Our three year old son ate a good portion of it, because he thinks it was a sugar beet, and anything with sugar in it has got to be good. I fear the day that he finds out how much iron and vitamin A beets have.

Carrots are gangbuster crops here too. We filled a wagon on Sunday. The broccoli is just coming into its own. It likes frosty nights, and dares Mother Nature to snow. The potatoes also thumb their nose—or eyes—at the cold. The green peppers are crispy and green, the size of your fist. Even the sweet corn, which was planted after the tomatoes, is ripening up enough for us to eat.

So we have to be patient with tomatoes. I want to be a bully, shame them into action: “Come on, you panty-waisted loafers. What are you waiting for? Ripen, or I’ll feed you to the slugs one by one!” But I kept my words to myself, and cover them with blankets at night like children. Maybe they will thank me for it someday, by making a nice spaghetti sauce or casserole base. But don’t hold your breath. As the saying goes, “Don’t count your tomatoes before they ripen.” Or something like that.