Cooking and Gardening for American Slackers

Part One: Growing Tomatoes From Slices

Summer is on the way, and you may be dreading the stories you’ll hear from your friends or relatives about their incredible heirloom tomato patch.

You may have an uncle Cletus that cooks the tomatoes down for a spicy Picante sauce or a mother who walks to her garden with her salt and pepper shakers so she can munch on fresh Black Krim tomatoes while she watches Duran Duran videos from her phone.

Your niece Moon Tulip Child, who lives out west in a friendly commune (not the manipulative one that makes you bathe in the outhouse), grows her Big Rainbow and Costaluto Genovese tomatoes for the organic tomato juice that she adds to her stew and breakfast cereal.

Your neighbor, Stewart, places a wireless speaker in his tomato garden and plays sad songs to enhance the growing process. From Ave Maria to Tracy Chapman, he plays a variety of songs, but they all have one thing in common. They’re all full of sadness.

Stew claims that depression, anxiety, guilt, fearfulness, and hopelessness are vibes that the plants absorb and use to grow stronger. “What makes us sad…just makes them more powerful.”

He sometimes fights back the heavy tears when he prunes his prize Brandywines while listening to Glenn Danzig.

He sends you and the neighbors a text when he throws his annual Heirloom Tomato, Artisanal Cider, and Bathtub Gin party. And you ignore it because Stewart is a nutjob, and you don’t want anything to do with him.

Yes, the freak can grow an heirloom tomato, but his theory about melancholy sound waves is too much for you to handle.

You remove him from all of your online accounts and sit back and ponder how to cultivate tomatoes without receiving advice from your strange family, neglected (psychotic) neighbor, or pompous friends.

Online seed companies are selling out of their heirloom vegetables quickly these days, but you can avoid inflated seed prices or underhanded seed dealers (not every seed company is reputable or has viable seeds). I call the sleazy, fraudulent dealers the bad seeders. “I bought pumpkin seeds, but it grew into Hemlock!”

Purchase an Overpriced Tomato

Even at a farmer’s market, heirloom tomatoes aren’t cheap. You can expect to pay one to three dollars more per pound for an heirloom variety. It’s true that they taste much better than grocery-store slicers, and their price can be justified by how difficult they are to sell in a large commercial market.

Heirloom tomato plants aren’t as prolific as some of the hybrid varieties, and depending on the type, some heirlooms are more susceptible to fungus and disease. They also ripen quicker than commercial varieties and are therefore harder to transport and sell.

When I planted fifty heirlooms in my backyard, I spent a lot of time keeping the pests from destroying the fruit, but I’m glad I grew so many because some of the plants produced only ten to fifteen tomatoes.

Summers in Eastern North Carolina are humid and hot, and the temperature doesn’t drop by too many degrees at night, but depending on the climate in your area, you may have a better yield with your heirlooms.

If you want to grow up to thirty heirloom tomatoes, all you need is one expensive tomato and a pot filled with potting soil. Find an heirloom that you like at a market or high-end grocery store and cut it into three or four slices.

The slices should be about ¼ inch thick, but you can set aside the stem side and bottom of the tomato. Those sections don’t contain many seeds.

Fill a two- or three-gallon container ¾ full with potting soil and place the tomatoes about an inch apart on the dirt. With three tomatoes, you can form a triangle on the soil. With four, you’ll create a square.

Cover the tomatoes with soil, add water, and place outside after the last frost in your area. Keep the soil moist with frequent watering, and you’ll start to see several shoots appear after ten to twelve days.

You can thin some of the plants out if you only want to grow a few, or you can carefully remove the plants and place them in small transplant pots until they get large enough to plant in your yard or a larger pot.

I’ve read about other ways to plant seeds from a purchased tomato, but some techniques are incredibly complicated and time-consuming.

One method requires drying the seeds for several days before you put them in a seed starter greenhouse. If you procrastinate and have lazy moments like me, that seems like too much work.

I appreciate complex techniques that achieve superior results, but waiting for seeds to dry is an extra step that you don’t need.

Slice up a tomato, and grab your friends for a game of organic horseshoes and toss the slices in the soil. Cover the tomatoes and play something sad and horrifying like How Deep Is Your Love by the Bee Gees.

Here are some heirlooms that I’ve grown and recommend:

• Black Krim
• Purple Cherokee
• Green Zebra
• Japanese Black Trifele
• Yellow Brandywine
• Amish Paste