Crying over lost tomatoes

Oh, my little tomatillos, I had such high hopes for you. My robust romas, my beautiful beefsteaks, we were going to do great things together in the kitchen.

I'm grieving over lost tomatoes this week and writing about it may be cathartic in coming to terms with my loss. It's a sad story that began a couple of months ago when we expanded the garden.

My husband wondered at the time if the expanded portion of the garden would impede access to our water well, but we looked over the terrain and figured if the well ever needed work, a truck could get in on the east side. Besides, how often does a water well go bad?

So I planted what I hoped would be a bumper crop of tomatoes and other vegetables and spent the dry summer nurturing them, hand-watering them, primping them, coveting them.

But as luck would have it, the pump on our water well died last week and after two days without water, a well technician showed up with a new pump.

Our next-door neighbor, who shares the well with us, brought in equipment to take out a couple of stumps and smooth out the ground so the truck could get to the well outside the garden. It was too difficult, though, and when the well guy refused to drive over the torn-up soil because he figured he'd get stuck, the only route was through the garden.

Ironically, I had just finished reading about award-winning tomato recipes in the Inter Lake's food section Wednesday morning when our neighbor came to deliver the bad news: "We need to rip up your garden to get the truck to the well."

The only other option was hiring a crane to get in and do the work, at an exorbitant cost of several hundred dollars. So I begged for a few minutes to pick what green tomatoes I could before I ripped up the plants and the raised boxes.

It was painful.

As the first rain in many weeks fell upon my sacred garden ground, I was uprooting an entire summer's worth of work. Mud and tomato cages were flying everywhere. We saved about half, maybe two-thirds of the rest of the garden, but it was my prized tomatoes that took the biggest hit. The zucchini plants also were in the path of destruction, along with my beets, peppers and a few potato plants.

Zucchini is expendable, beets too, but tomatoes - there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that can match the home-grown taste of fresh tomatoes. I wait all year to savor the taste of my red beauties in salads, BLTs and other dishes before putting the rest into tomato juice and sauce for the winter.

A zucchini tastes like a zucchini, I think, whether you pick it or buy it in the supermarket. Same with green beans and some other vegetables (carrots excluded; they're best from the garden, too).

I salvaged a wash basket full of green tomatoes, some of them still pretty small, and I'm hoping some of them will ripen. A colleague said to spread them out on newspapers in the basement and then cover them with newspapers to induce ripening, so I'll try that.

Another colleague already has taken pity on me, bringing me a small bag of ripe cherry tomatoes. She's a Midwesterner, too, and knows that there's some kind of a spiritual connection between people and their gardens.

The good news is that we got the well fixed and have water again. As for me and my 'maters, I may have to have a summer's-end get together featuring a lot of fried green tomatoes.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com