Homegrown Tomatoes

Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes. - Guy Clark

Yep, it’s that time of year for sure. For awhile, when the first tomatoes start to ripen, folks hoard them but mid-September they remember, yet again, that there’s no stopping those ambitious little tomato vines. It would be a sin not to do something with them. People set to work freezing and canning. Around here all the wives make mammoth batches of spaghetti sauce (or “gravy” as some here call it) to put by for the winter. I swear my entire neighborhood smells of simmering tomato sauce loaded with garlic and fresh basil.

Lucky for me a few people have also passed their tomatoes on to garden-less friends. I’ve got a good sized basket full of homegrown tomatoes, scallions, and garlic out in the kitchen right now.

Back where I come from in Pennsylvania, keeping a garden was something most folks did. Even if they didn’t have room for a a full garden they could find a spot for a couple of tomato plants, a few onions and, of course, the ubiquitous rhubarb plant that grew like a shrub outside the kitchen door. When the first snows of winter cleared away my Grandmother Werner would have to go out and check on the rhubarb plants that dotted her big yard.

Gram Werner’s rhubarb plant was a child of a plant that her mother-in-law had outside her own kitchen door and which she divided and passed along to her children. When Gram divided her plant some of it wound up in the yard of one daughter in Erie, Pennsylvania and another in my Dad’s garden. That plant went on to sire plants that went with his children as they moved away. Over the years of my wandering, I planted Gram Werner’s rhubarb in a number of places, the last one being in Marblehead. I sometimes think I should drive by that house in Marblehead and see if its new owner kept it. They would if they knew its lineage.

But growing vegetables and passing them on is usually a lovely tradition kept by country folk — and some city folk too. My Mother always used to say that September was the only month of the year in which you had to lock you car in St. Marys. If you didn’t people would put zucchini in it. Zucchini. Is there anything in the world that grows like zucchini? My Uncle Tommy has always been a prolific gardener and, since it is just he and Aunt Mary Rita, never uses all the vegetables he grows. He puts extra produce in a cardboard box and sits it on the sidewalk out front with a sign saying “Free, Help Yourself”. Usually the box is emptied within hours but he swears people ADD zucchini to the box.

Uncle Tommy and Aunt Mary Rita married late in life and, even thirty years later, are still in love.”You should taste the tomato relish your Aunt Mary Rita made,” he will say when I visit. “I couldn’t have made it without the tomatoes your Uncle Tommy grew,” she’ll say. They are my inspiration.

So, it is chilly this morning. I write wrapped in one of my warm shawls. Yesterday for lunch I had a sandwich of homegrown tomatoes and scallions. Back home I would have made it on my Mother’s homemade rye bread but here Sclafani’s semolina is a perfectly wonderful substitute. You slice it thin and spread both pieces with a light coating of mayonnaise. Wash the sun-warmed tomato sitting on the windowsill and slice it, layering it on the bread with plenty of black pepper. Add a couple scallions, sliced thin, too. Put the lid on and — bliss.

I can’t wait for lunch today. In fact, nothing says you can’t have a sandwich of homegrown tomatoes for breakfast, right? See you later.

Thanks for reading.