"...and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Guy Clark
Guy Clark's song is true - and over here we've got homegrown tomatoes and true love coming out our ears. The true love can be put up for winter until it is chilly and huddling together for warmth looks good, but the tomatoes, well, they have to be eaten, and preserved. So that's what your blogiste is doing today.
You might as well listen to the song while I'm at it:
More like this
When you look over the assortment of sizes, shapes and colors of tomatoes displayed in the market, do you stop to consider the time and effort that went into developing them (more than ten years to create a new commercial cultivar)?
The
href="http://www.fda.gov/default.htm" rel="tag">FDA
just can't win. When they restrict something or say something
negative, they are being too restrictive or complicit with big pharma.
I am not entirely sure that the FDA has actually identified a tomato with Salmonella on it. The tomato hypothesis was based on recall data, which is notoriously iffy. Not totally useless, but iffy.
Haven't we done enough to the poor tomato? We've turned the voluptuous fruit into a pale imitation of itself: the average supermarket tomato, turned red with ethylene, tastes like, well, nothing.
With two working parents and a 13 month old toddler and no nearby relatives to watch our daughter, too many of our tomatoes have rotted instead of getting preserved. But even with that we have over 4 gallons of salsa canned in the basement and about 10 gallons of romas sitting on the porch ready to be preserved.
The city of Northbrook IL told a resident to get rid of her tomato plants because they don't look as nice as suburban grass:
http://triblocal.com/Northbrook/detail/209712.html
Those stories such as Ken just posted, about outlaw veggie gardens just continue to amaze me, even though I've been reading them for several years now.
I will say that the reader comments usually appended to the newspaper articles, more and more, seem to be voicing support for gardens, fruit trees, chickens, etc. Even one such reader mentioned that this situation is changing due to the changing economic times. This is why I love reading online newspaper article reader comments. Even though they can be very hostile and nasty, it's interesting to watch the social situation evolve.
Amusingly a colleague of mine has a completely different take on homegrown tomatoes - to paraphrase him
"this year I grew tomatoes, they're a lot like store bought tomatoes, only they cost me maybe five times as much, and didn't taste quite as good"
Apparently money can buy you home grown tomatoes. Poopy ones. Latterly he decided to return said plants to the wild, and ran his mower over them.
Ken's comment scares me somewhat, living in suburbia as I do, with all the lawn regulations (which thankfully as yet aren't enforced very stringently from observation of the neighbors yard) and my desire to expand my vegetable garden so that I can be producing nothing on a larger scale - I'll be mightily upset should the city come tell me I can't grow nothing but grass (of between 0.25 and 4" in height)
Thanks for the song, it was very amusing for me and my daughters. I live in one of the poorer parts of town, downtown. The nice thing about it is that when we want to make some part of our yard into garden, no one really cares, or we get nice comments from the neighbors. Living simply is easier in some ways here that I think it would be in the suburbs, simply because we live among people who have even less than we do.