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A few days ago I ate my first vine-ripened garden tomato, standing over the kitchen sink with a salt shaker in one hand and red-ripe tomato in the other, juice dripping from my chin with each bite.
That's the way to eat the first tomato.
Technically, my first garden tomato this year was a cherry tomato. I ate it standing in the garden, right where I found it, a few days earlier. Cherry and grape tomatoes are great, and I always pop a few in my mouth when I walk through my garden, but they don't count when the question is, "Do you have any ripe tomatoes yet?"
It's not an idle question. Tomatoes, along with sweet corn, are to me the main reasons for having a garden, and it always seems like an eternity until the ears of corn fill out and the tomatoes turn from green to red.
Even with those two items, though, there is a difference: I grow a lot, and give away a lot of sweet corn, but am very chary (a lovely archaic word meaning "suspiciously reluctant") when it comes to giving away tomatoes, even when I have a bumper crop.
I justify this selfishness, in part, because my wife puts up a lot of tomatoes, mainly as sauce, and she uses a lot of it throughout the year. Maybe the difference is that I know few people have garden space for sweet corn, but anybody can find a pot or nook for tomatoes. Part of me says, "If you like home-grown tomatoes so much, why didn't you grow your own?"
Gardening is a lot of work. It requires thought and some experience, and there's no guarantee you're going to harvest a great crop of anything.
Some of my first tomatoes turned red because they had blossom-end rot. It was worrisome, but haven't seen much of that since. First we got too much rain, and the plants and weeds were going crazy, and now too little rain, I have to irrigate, and a lot of bottom leaves are dying. The first planting of green beans didn't come up, the raccoons got into my first corn, the rabbits ate the tops of my beets and the deer beheaded the broccoli and cauliflower plants.
Am I whining? Sorry.
Anyway, after trapping a half-dozen raccoons (and sending them along to Raccoon Heaven) the second corn crop is very good. I planted so many beets we still have plenty, and Honey keeps reminding me that we have too much broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer anyway.
We tried a couple of new tomato varieties this year: Brandywine yellow and Marzano. The first Brandywine yellow I picked was a big slicer that we used on ham and cheese sandwiches when grandson Lamppost Head came for dinner. It was good, but maybe too low-acid for my taste. Sure was pretty on the sandwich, though.
The Marzano is a small Italian paste tomato prized for flavor. I will have to do a taste comparisons with the big Amish paste and Bus Garage Italians we have grown for several years.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm gave us the seed for the latter, saying a co-worker at the school bus garage grew it from seed his grandfather brought from Italy a hundred years ago. He didn't know the name, so we named it Bus Garage Italian. This year the man didn't get any started himself, so we were pleased to return the favor with sets that Honey starts under grow lights in the house.
I am fond of the Pink Girl tomatoes we grow every year, a flavorful pink with resistance to disease and gnarling, and a good round shape. We grow the grapes and cherries each year from saved seed, too. They must cross because their shapes, sizes and colors vary greatly.
Well, that's the garden report for late July 2025. And please, if you don't happen to receive any home-grown tomatoes from me, don't read too much into it. We're still friends.