gramps' jurassic park tomatoes

Gramps and two of his grandsons at our visit to Froberg Farms

Heritage Gardening Tale as journaled a couple of weeks ago...

We're on the streets of Houston pulling two weeks worth of luggage behind an Excursion bulging with people. We just shared a bucket of peanuts and a hearty dinner with some of our dearest friends at a steakhouse and are ready to set out in a caravan for a fourteen hour drive to stay with the Nelson family in the now-familiar mountains of Alabama.

We're chatting over a whole gamut of topics as we bump along on the first leg of our long journey. I'm telling D'Lane about some garden-related story when something lights on my memory. I reach forward and lay a hand on Gramps shoulder.

“Yeah, Pasquale?”

I ask him a question about an story I remember him telling me long ago, and with great animation he reiterates the tale.

“In the garden I had out at the church, I was plantin' tomatoes and I built up the bed about a foot – kinda like y'all do. I put the tomatoes in and every week I was carting in cottonseed mill and rice hulls and just tilling it in.

“Those suckers looked so good. Boy, I'll tell ya, the stalks on those things were this big around – I could put my hands around them just like this.” Gramps' eyes widen with his grin as he forms his large hands into the shape of a circle.

I figure the diameter is about 4 inches and my eyes widen too.

“And not just the stalks, but the branches that came off. I had to stake them on bold sides just to hold them up. Oh, and they were just covered with fruit. Tomatoes would be bunched up in groups of four just weighting down the branches.”

I close my eyes and picture it – seventeen massive plants soaking in cascading sunrays, swaying under the bulk of green clumps shining sweet and bright.

“That cottonseed mill is key, because it really attracts the earthworms to aerate your beds. The rice hulls you can get for nothin' from the dryer. Using rice hulls had a con, though, because where they piled it up was full of nut weed – they call it that because the root looks just like a little nut – and those weeds are nearly impossible to kill. But, oh, using rice hulls is so worth the effort, especially when you have gumbo like we do down here. If you till in the rice hulls, you can turn gumbo into a soil that you can literally sift through your hand.”

I watch his splayed fingers rake through an imaginary bed and think back to the hours I spent clawing through the tight clay in our front yard this past week. I smile at the thought of digging through the warm, fluffy soil of the raised beds out back – the result of a half decade of composting and layering and attracting our own little underground farm of worms.

“Those tomato plants... it was like Jurassic Park – I wish I had pictures to show you. I was out there thinking about getting a camera, but by the time I got back to the house, I thought, 'aw, I don't want to drive back out there' so I decided to just wait until I went back over there the next morning.

“Sure enough, that afternoon at 3 o'clock a hail storm came through – and it came through hard. I didn't even want to go out there to see what it did to the tomato plants. But after a few days, Gemaw said, “don't you think you oughtta go out there and clean it up?” - and I thought I should so it wouldn't be a mess on Sunday.

“The hail did get the tomatoes and they were split right in half,” his hand draws a line in the air, “and just laid over into the bed. We only had about a week to go before those tomatoes were ripe, and we were just waiting on them.”

“I bet you went out there and found picante sauce makin' on the ground!” Aunt D'Lane pipes in.

I nearly feel sick thinking about the baskets of tomatoes scattered and busted under the tangles of fallen and tattered giants.

Gramps continues, “I went through and picked up all of the fruit – I mean to tell you, I picked up – and I counted it – 173 tomatoes off of just seventeen plants.”

“One hundred and seventy-three?!” I exclaim.

“173 – I'll never forget it.” He nods. “But as I was cleaning up I saw that one stalk had put out a bloom. It was still alive. So I bent down and looked at the split branches that were laid over like this,” the hands tilt, “and sure enough, everywhere the branches touched the ground they were taking root. I was remembering what I'd learned about what happens when a plant goes through such trauma and they go into this hyper-active healing state. So I left them to see what would happen.

“Let me tell you, those suckers...” Gramps' forehead wrinkles characteristically as he chuckles at the memory, “those tomato plants looked like the dickens laying around, but, boy, did they produce. They probably produced three times the amount of tomatoes that they had before. They looked awful, but, I gotta tell ya, we were givin' so many tomatoes away that Summer that people were getting' sick of us offerin' them. I have never seen tomatoes produce like they did.”

Beauty from ashes.

Do y'all have any stories of garden catastrophes 
that were actually blessings in disguise?

I'd love to hear about them. Share your story below!
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