The first tomato, and on being a tomato snob.

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by finding two small ripe tomatoes in my garden. Here's one of them:




The other one has already been eaten. This one will be saved for a while just so I can smell it. There's just nothing at all like that fresh garden-grown tomato smell. That's what's behind my being a tomato snob. It's not that I'll only eat heirloom tomatoes that originated from seeds my gr-gr-grand-aunt planted in 1870 and have been at least a mile away from anything non-organic for three decades. It's just that those things that they sell in the grocery stores and serve in most restaurants bear as much resemblance to a real tomato as does the plastic tomato slice that came with the McDonald's play food set that I bought for my granddaughter a few years ago. I generally don't touch tomatoes unless they are fresh from the garden and were picked as red as a firetruck.

This is clearly going to be a prolific year, too. First of all, even though I've not fed them or gone out and talked nice encouraging thoughts to them, they're clearly loving on the really good soil we have here at this house. It just was never kind of me to expect so much from my garden when we had 98% sand in the old house. Second, I've never planted plum tomatoes and never had any idea how thick with fruit they become - both of the plum tomato plants are almost obscenely covered with baby tomatoes.

And I didn't exactly choose to plant plums this year. What happened was that I bought six tomato plants, two each of three different varieties (no plums or cherries) at our Ag department's annual sale, but somehow those plants didn't make it into my car. By the time I got back over there, all they had left were individual plants that had lost their markers. I just chose 6 at random, trying to get as much visual diversity in hopes of getting as much variation in types of tomatoes as possible. So we ended up with two plums and four others - all I know is that they're "regular" tomatoes.

Since this pretty little thing is only actually as big as a ping-pong ball, it will likely just sit there waiting for me to occasionally sniff it until we get some more and can start on our tomato-basil-extra virgin olive oil salad summer addiction.