Tomatoes ...

My Roma tomatoes are loaded.

By next week, I'm going to have tasty fat red tomatoes sitting smugly on my counter on sheets of paper towels. In spite of the cool temperatures of the last few weeks, the blossoms on the Romas set, although the Better Boy variety vines put their energy into leaf rather than fruit. Lazy weeds. All of them got yummy cow manure and epsom salts for their spring snack, but the Romas are far more industrious. That's why the Romas will get extra water, and the Better Boys will get the ol' hedge-trimmers in two weeks to explain to them why it's important to get serious.

Well, of course they understand these things. These are tomatoes, not carrots. Tomatoes are not mindless vegetables, they are pets, and they must be trained. If you cage them, or tie them to a stake, they grow resentful or occasionally, psychotic, and either grow to be eight feet tall (with the idea of getting the drop on you) or refuse to bear more than a scant handful or so of mealy fruit. Sure, you can medicate them with Miracle-Gro or somesuch fertilizer to make them produce, zombie-like, but you run the risk of wearing them out before the end of the season. Halloween is the end of the season out here, I don't want to cut short my tomatoes lifetime just so they can snort nitrogen.

Last year I was precipitous, and tried two new tomato varieties: 4th of July (reputed to be a very early tomato) and Bush Big Boy (acclaimed for the classic Big Boy taste but on a determinate vine.) 4th of July produced early, but the fruits were small -- hardly larger than a cherry tomato, the taste and texture of which I find unpalatable. The vines knew it, and in spite, produced only a few fruits the size of small marbles. Morons.

Bush Big Boy set handsome fruits in a gorgeous tasty cluster -- and then withered, died, and disappeared, figuring work was done by August. Jerks. Slackers. We only got one round of BLT's the whole summer.

Tomorrow I need to trim the lantana off the tomatoes by the driveway. I'll wade in and stroke the vines, releasing their intoxicating tomato scent, tickling the blossoms to help them set some more. I'll tell them they're doing a good job, and that I love them.