TOMATO DREAMS

The first tomatoes of the season make dream of a bustling kitchen where a capable cook prepares huge batches of tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and  ketchup for canning.  I think the image in my mind's eye comes from an old Judy Garland and Margaret Sullivan movie, Meet me in Saint Louis.  Plump and  gravel voiced  Marjorie Main played the  cook, Katie,  who labored over a vat of ketchup in a Victorian kitchen complete with Willoware. Watching her, one could almost almost could easily imagine that savory scent  of allspice, cinnamon, cloves wafted through house, calling up memories of  picnics and  barbeques. 

There are no faithful  retainers in my house, more is the pity. Canning is a labor intensive chore usually performed in the dog days of summer. It requires fortitude and dedication along with the certainty that there is a serious demand for the  product of one's labor.

The reality is that it makes no economic sense to make ketchup for my small family. A few years ago a friend brought me such  a large quantity of mangoes I felt compelled to make mango chutney. It was good chutney, as chutneys go. I gave away several jars, my family ate a few and there reamained such a vast number of jars  we slapped our FLAGRANTLY DELICIOUS label  on them and tried to sell them at a town fair. I found out that ours is not chutney country--the salsa vendors did not fare that ell either. I think that ketchup would go a bit faster and no doubt the home canned variety would be superior to stuff available at the store.   It makes more sense to think of my tomatoes as ingredients for salad, sandwiches and pasta primavera. Still, I like to think that someday I will have a reason to dust off my pressure cooker and fill dozens of canning jars with FLAGRANTLY DELICIOUS ketchup.

IT'S TIME TO PLANT OUT THOSE TOMATOES

                                                                 Tigerella tomato seedlings.

In mid-June, the flower garden rests. Coreopsis, that old standbys of perennial gardens does not do well in our clay soil. Shasta daisies need to be replanted in great volumes in order to make a show. Among the roses, only the ubiquitous Dorothy Perkins, purloined from an abandoned farmhouse, puts forth its dusty looking clusters of mottled pink. Blue veronica makes a modest show and russian sage puts in the shiest of appearances. Annuals planted in March demur. Weeds flourish, covering the flower beds in great splashes of misleading green. Black spot, the bane of the organic gardener's existence takes hold upon rose leaves. For real life gardeners, such dismal times balance the easy glory of late spring. It is well that at this point the vegetable garden begins to produce beets, tomatoes, snow peas and rhubarb, although the latter, in spite of muych cosseting and massive doses of blood meal yields just enough to make a deep dish pie for the man in life. We savor it under the wisteria arbor, as sunlight plays hide-and-seek in the woods. A goldfish darts beneath the young leaves of a waterlily, in the fish pond, the wood thrush and mourning doves concertize and all is well with the world.