Somethin' Outta Nothin'

After over a week of dealing with the chaotic process of delivering youngest daughter & all her worldly possessions to the university, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been tending to my sideyard vegetable garden. At last glance, my tomato plants were staked, relatively pruned, weeded and looked like a champ. The fruit had been ‘almost’ ready. Not now. A couple rains, wind & then hot sun had ripened, over-ripened, then split the (adjective deleted) tomatoes from the blossom end down. My number ones had morphed into culls.

But then I had a revelation. I realized that I had to think like a grower. And that’s with all due respect to these guys that put their tails & wallets on the line every year, hoping that some rogue hailstorm or pestilence or--God forbid--locusts doesn’t knock them out of the box for the season.

So, in my new role as a scrupulous grower/shipper, I tried to reap some value from this non-gradable (barnyard noun deleted). With the mantra of ‘I-don’t-have-ugly-children-I-don’t-have-ugly-children’ coursing through my brain, I inspected the product. Any split containing insects, mold or ‘that black stuff’ (hey, I’m no botanist) was discarded to decay into the soil for next year’s crop, otherwise I kept it. Yes, this practice is noticeably unsightly to the untrained eye and neighbors but I read somewhere in a book that this supplies nutrients to the dirt, and the garbage can’s too far away anyway.

I took the fruits of my labor in the house, washed them, then took to slicing out the bad parts with my trusty Cutco knife, after donning my reading glasses. Age is a wonderful thing. And what do you know, I was able to salvage at least 70% of my yield!

Now I gotta find a way to get a 30% adjustment from the grower…

Later,

Jay