Tomatoes in two weeks? Its been a peculiar year for gardening

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The garden hadn’t been in two weeks when I picked my first ripe tomato.

Or, I should say, my first three ripe tomatoes.

Now, Janine, you ask, all the while scratching your head, tomatoes in two weeks?

Well, it has been a peculiar year.

By the time I got the vegetable garden planted, it was June 16. I’d never been so late.

But what is one to do when torrential rains are dumping 5 inches of water on your garden? I can just see me out there trying to sprinkle the carrot seeds in their plot of earth while the heavenly Niagara of the Great North Woods is pouring down on my head.

So it was June 16 when I planted the last seeds. Then I went away for four days. When I came back, I replanted about half of the pole beans because the rain had compacted the soil so much that the beans couldn’t force their way through the inch or less of ground above them. I can’t tell you how many sprouted beans I found that couldn’t budge the soil. I even had to abandon my usual finger-as-tool planting method and use an actual garden implement to loosen the dirt, which is how I discovered the imprisoned sprouts.

But you know what’s really weird?

A month later, those replanted beans are in bloom.

It’s almost like a “Twilight Zone” episode.

Which brings me back to the tomatoes, which probably could write their own “Twilight Zone” series.

Tomatoes are said to be the most popular U.S. garden crop, but go back 250 years and you couldn’t give ’em away in this country.

It is believed that this member of the nightshade family, which hails from the westward side of South America (circa 700 A.D., some write), migrated by some means – human, llama, dodo, who knows? – to Central America. By the time the Spanish conquered those regions, the tomato was in cultivation.

Once the Spanish got ahold of the tomato, it began its journey around the world. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato), it was distributed to the Caribbean, the Philippines and Asia. By the 1540s, it was in cultivation in Europe. No evidence states definitively when Europeans started eating tomatoes, but it is thought that by the early 1600s tomatoes were used for food in Spain.

It wasn’t until 1692 that the first-known cookbook with tomato recipes was published, and that was in Naples, Italy. Wikipedia says that the recipes were, however, Spanish.

Not everybody would eat tomatoes because many believed that the plant and its fruit were poisonous, just like other members of the nightshade family. Tomatoes weren’t grown in England until the 1590s and then only as a curiosity. It didn’t help that a barber-surgeon named John Gerard wrote in a widely accepted botanical tome that tomatoes were poisonous, even though he knew tomatoes were being eaten in Spain and Italy.

That led to folks in the Colonies adopting the attitude of mother England. The tide started to change, however, with Thomas Jefferson, who grew tomatoes in 1781. It wouldn’t be until the first half of the next century that the tomato became widely accepted as a food.

Now, it is everybody’s darling.

Well, I actually know people who hate tomatoes, but let’s not go there.

As we fade credits on “The Twilight Zone: Tomatoes,” we begin a showing of “Miracle on 34th Street,” whereby someone decides to sue over whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable.

Leave it to the Americans to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court of these United States in 1887. Some fellow did not want to pay the vegetable tax because – and it’s true – the tomato is a berry.

But the court ended up ruling that because the tomato is eaten with the meal and not as dessert, it is legally a vegetable.

Chocolate tomato cake, anyone? I even have a spice cake recipe that calls for tomato juice.

And don’t forget that less than 100 years later, there was that whole ketchup-is-a-vegetable controversy during President Reagan’s effort to cut school lunch program costs.

All this over a tomato.

Three of which I picked on June 29.

The only miracle was that in planting these tomatoes a couple of weeks prior, I didn’t break the main vines of the 6-foot-tall plants I bought from Dick Smith of Glenburn Gardens.

Early this year, you see, Dick started more than 100 tomatoes in five-gallon buckets.

I bought two of the Jet Stars in early June, when they already towered over my head and were dripping with fruit, lashed to a sturdy stake to keep the vine upright.

And so ends “The Mystery of the 2-Week-Old Tomatoes.”

Tune in next time for “The Cantaloupes That Were Cucumbers.”

Or maybe it’ll be “The Peach and the Papyrus.”

Or maybe “The Pale Watermelon.”

Or “Japanese Beetles Ate My Column.”

Egad.

Janine Pineo’s e-mail is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.