Tomato Diaries

It feels more like a farm than a garden here, although it’s possible that my expectations have been lowered exponentially by my own garden’s meager results. In any case, it has been such a treat bringing a bowl out and looking for things ready to be picked. I’ve filled the bowl multiple times with blackberries, strawberries, green beans, and a variety of tomatoes. It’s been so fun that I’ve been getting distracted from my mission, especially when my fingertips turned purple from the ripe blackberries and I tried to finger paint things.

In my studies it has become clear that while gardening is a labor of love, it is also a ruthless numbers game. While many of the plants here could be in a calendar for hot plants, others have been less successful despite receiving basically the same care. Why is that? Is it nature vs. nurture? Is a seed’s fate decided before it’s even in the soil? I certainly don’t know, but I have learned that the more successful plants you have, the less you notice the failures. So I don’t need to fail less, I just need to succeed more. And while everything here is higher quality, higher tech, and executed to a much grander scale, the basic gardening is not that different from what I’m doing (aside from the initial overcrowding).

While I’m feeling inspired, I feel like I should mention that this visit has not been all sunshine and lollipops. First the dog peed inside, even though we went outside in regular hourly intervals, in addition to whenever she went by the door. The pee felt like a direct personal slight, and I don’t know how to mend our relationship. Then, in the fifteen minutes I left to get a pizza one night, the area was hit with a blackout. I did not notice this until my return, when I found myself locked outside of their big and very secure mechanical gate. I examined and pushed at it for a while and it would not budge. Part of me wanted to just park my car elsewhere and hop the gate with my pizza, hoping all would resolve itself by morning. But leaving it for my friend to deal with when she got home felt like a dick move. After realizing I had no idea what to even Google in this situation, I decided to call and interrupt their vacation. Maybe they’d have an idea of how to get it moving manually?

This was a confusing process, especially at nightfall. It involved sending pictures of different machine parts, with and without flash, while her son tried to talk me through different steps over the phone based on my limited knowledge of what I was looking at. Luckily, he had experienced a similar situation before and was patient. Patience was key, because I really didn’t understand anything we were talking about. Eventually I understood my friend’s son enough to get the heavy gate unlocked and pulled wide enough for my car to fit through, then close it again. What should have been a fifteen minute pizza run became a nearly two hour mental and physical battle that I was not equipped for. I hope it never happens again, I really didn’t like it.

I felt bad for interrupting my friend’s vacation, but I would have felt worse if I just left it for them to deal with. When I finally got back to the house, I ate my pizza, celebrated the dog for not peeing inside, and went to bed. I could not wait to sleep off that nightmare and get back in the garden.