You Say Tomato, I Say…

By Jim Doyle

It dawned on me last night, floating in my hot tub, smelling the smoke from one of my neighbor’s wood fires, alternately warmed and chilled by the 50-degree variation between my water temperature and the air, that we are closing in on winter. Winter in Lake Charles, of course, means thoughts turn to idle consideration of when, or if, a freeze will kill my banana trees, and whether I should cook some fish (maybe even some pork) in those gorgeous leaves before that happens.

And if it’s getting colder, then the Megaholidays are on the way. Remember when the Macy’s Parade was the traditional start of the Christmas season, Santa Claus and big balloons with turkey roasting in the oven? Now we’re lucky to get past Halloween before the trees are for sale. I actually saw potted pines with ornaments in my grocery store last week. My staff has already placed a rather generous holiday schedule on my calendar. Soon, we’ll have one seamless celebration from Labor Day to Mardi Gras to Easter.

Harrumph!!!

This may be the year without a Christmas tree at my house. I’m down to one teenager and one returnee, and as for me, I’d be satisfied decorating my immortal tomato plant. Hey, at least it would be a “live tree.” This is, of course, a fantasy on my part. My son Harry would like to have the house decorated in National Lampoon mode (Clark Griswold and the many mini-lights). Probably should put something up.

Now, about my tomato plant.

I began gardening this year. In pots. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to commit actual labor by digging a garden; pots just seemed so much more, I don’t know, portable. Then there were the birds. An unguarded garden in my back yard would be vulnerable to all kinds of casual eaters, and since I planned to have a bounty of fresh, organic vegetables available, I wanted to keep them on my patio where my various domesticated animals, including five grandchildren, would likely shoo them away.

So, with optimism, I ordered tomato plants and other seeded mini-pots from some anonymous ad on the back of a Parade magazine. You know the type. They arrived a couple weeks later in a box, which someone helpfully deposited on my breakfast table, where they stayed for a couple of months until one of the members of the Former Mrs. Doyle Club opened the box and took a couple of the plants to her house. This was, I don’t know, maybe April.

By June, I figured I had to move the box. Looked at the seed pods. Didn’t seem too complicated. Bought some bags of dirt and planted them in the pots, and lo and behold, Magic! Green sprouts! I never knew I could do that!

Now I was hooked. I called over my yard guy and got him to transplant my then-dying banana trees, left there by another Club member, into my yard. As I watered them, an amazing thing happened. They grew! By this point I was out of control.

One day at the hardware store getting copies made of my house keys, I saw a pack of squash seeds. I love squash. Bought some more dirt and a couple more pots and planted the suckers in my patio garden. Damned if they didn’t sprout, too! My plants became my afternoon companions and part of my routine: work all day, go home, feed the dog, feed the teenager, water the plants. Even though I never spoke to my plants, I now sympathized with those who do, people I had previously considered eccentric. Hell, I’m not eccentric!

Spent most of my afternoons in the garden section of Wal-Mart. Bought two lemon trees on line and planted them in pots in my house. Bought two Bonsai trees, for God’s sake, in Florida. Added some low-light (as opposed to low-life) greenery in my kitchen. Made plans for harvest.

No harvest.

There must be something about this gardening thing I haven’t figured out. One of my tomato plants did produce five or six small fruit. The squash bloomed beautifully but yielded one miserable, hard, tasteless gourd. Finally I pulled up all the offending greenery and was about to plow the pots after Josie the Dog jumped onto a patio chair and broke my biggest remaining tomato stalk. But I never got around to it.

I decided instead to do some research. My ultimate resource is Google, which gave me a clue. Seems one of my tomato plants was engineered for cooler weather, like, say, Vermont, and that’s why it grew like Topsy but never “fruited” (and I never knew that was a verb until I became a gardener). I suppose that’s what happened to the squash, too.

Right about the time I was planning to yank my old friend the tomato from his roots, he started flowering. Last week – in November! – three fair-sized tomatoes appeared. And that’s when the idea struck me. I could move it into my house and decorate it with other ornaments, maybe a full-tomato theme. Maybe I’ll even flock the damned thing.

Since the tomato plant is either immortal or undead, it’s good for any number of stops on the seamless holiday trail. Hide eggs in the Easter Tomato, symbol of everlasting life. Scare little kids with the Halloween Tomato, a zombie with small fruit. Call him Scrooge for Christmas because he’s stingy with his produce.

Harrumph!

Hope you guys have better luck getting fruited.

See y’all on the flip.