Our Own "Victory Garden"
Having grown up on flavorless cardboard tomatoes from chain supermarkets, the switch to locally grown tomatoes was glorious. No big surprise, but tomatoes suck when they're picked early, preserved with chemicals then shipped several thousand miles. Local tomatoes, picked ripe, are like a completely different fruit.
You can't get any more local your own front yard. We grew the Green Zebra tomatoes pictured above on a rocky cliff face below our driveway, a mere 20 feet from the front door, alongside collard greens, Manoa lettuce, scallions, various herbs, eggplants, jalapeno peppers, Okinawan sweet potatoes, radishes, beets, and a pathetic little coffee bush.
We started our garden last year when funds got tight and food prices soared. Much like the victory gardens of World War II, our little patch was a way to make sure we could continue to eat well even if we reached a point where we couldn't afford all the produce we'd like. I'm happy to say it never got that dire, and I'm also happy to realize that--for the first time ever--the cost savings of eating our own produce outstripped the costs of growing it. Growing our own vegetables is delicious and economical.
We'll plant another garden next year. This time around, it won't be because we're cheap, but because we want real tomatoes again.
When I was in college, I worked a summer job at a market garden. Each spring I would plant 5,000 tomatoe plants. Each plant could produce 40 pounds of tomatoes. The best was grabbing a perfectly ripe tomatoe off the vine and making a toasted tomatoe sandwich with mayonnaise and salt and pepper. I still remember that taste.
That's a lot of tomatoes! My plants didn't produce 40lbs, but I can relate to picking right off the vine to eat. When they're ripe like that, the simplest preparations are best.
that must have been one tasty tomato to make a sandwich off it. Not the same with today's.
Yep - nice big Beefsteak tomatoes [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_(tomato) ] - a single slice would cover the entire sandwich...
Sounds delicious.