The $2.00 Cherry Tomato

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We have a few traditions around my house. By “around my house” I actually mean that the people in my immediate family that live in my house repeat certain activities every year. Not that we have traditions laying around the yard. Even up on blocks, having your yard strewn with traditions would bring the neighbors wrath down on you. “Look at that mess,” they’d say. “What’s next? Pink plastic flamingos?” I’d like to have a bunch of pink plastic flamingos in my yard, but *someone,*and I won’t say whom, said I couldn’t have any.

Having traditions is a good thing. It’s what separates up from the animals. It used to be tool use, but then they (scientists) found that chimpanzees use a chewed stick to pull termites out of their (the termites) nests to eat them (again, the termites). And a type of crow in the Pacific Northwest use crescent wrenches to open seashells. So the whole “tool using” thing separating us from animals is right out. So we’re stuck with either traditions or representative government. Me? I’m saying “traditions”. You do what you want.

One of our traditions here at Casa DeDay is our vegetable garden. We have two tomato plants in big pots up by the dog run. Oh, wait… tomatoes are fruits, so it’s (“It’s” is the contraction for “it is” and “its” is possessive, right? Or is it the other way?) our fruit garden. We have two tomato plants growing and that is our big farming tradition, three years running. Since we already had the big pots, the plant food and the tomato cages (you have to cage them up, tomatoes are Vicious Fruits- and I’m not talking the band) from last year, we just had to get some tomato plants. They were 99¢ each at the garden store. So if you round up, we dropped two samoleons into our garden this year. (We were a little late getting things going this year, but that seems to be a tradition too. So you see how far from the animals I’m separated?)

So we plant the plants and water them when we think about it (good thing it was a wet spring) and feed them occasionally and wait for things to grow. This year we have one cherry tomato plant and one yellow tomato plant. Soupo wanted some exotic tomatoes so we got the yellow ones. We really wanted to grow some grape tomatoes, but by the time we got to the garden store, all the grape tomato plants were gone. So we went with the yellow ones.

This weekend one of the cherry tomatoes ripened. Whatever tomato ripens first is the one we paid for. The rest are free. $2.00 for a cherry tomato. I was hoping a yellow tomato would ripen first. It’s at least bigger, so you get more tomato for your $2.00. Maybe even enough for a sammich. With bacon. Mmmmm… a bacon and tomato sammich. BLT’s are better, but we keep forgetting to get lettuce at the store. And when we do remember, it goes bad before the tomatoes are in. One of the yellow ones was doing pretty good. But then a squirrel ate it. Bastard rodent. I think I should get a plastic owl to guard my tomato plants against squirrels, but I haven’t found one yet. And the squirrels are just eating the free tomatoes, so it’s not like their gobbling up $2.00 tomatoes. So there’s that.

The Little Woman brought the tomato in and washed it up and left it on the counter. (She’s not a big tomato fan. She’s not a big fan of anything since she’s only 6" tall! Ha!) Soupo ate it before I knew it was in. He said it was pretty good. “Pretty good” for a $2.00 tomato. Sheesh.
-Rue.

2

So what did the crows use before the white man brought crescent wrenches to these shores? :wink:

And I don’t care what the nitpickers say - tomatoes are a vegetable. Do you put tomatoes in a fruit salad? No. Do you put them in a vegetable salad? Yes. So there it is - guilt by association. :slight_smile:

3

My cherry tomato plant died, along with all of my cucumbers - stupid Florida weather… And my other tomato plants have no blossoms. Mebbe I need to feed 'em to make 'em produce.

Can’t wait till I move back to the part of the country where tomatoes flourish.

I’m not even going to calculate how much I spent on these stupid plants. Eating a $50 tomato seems a bit extravagant…

4

I don’t have any tomato plants.

That’s the good thing about being a bachelor with a lot of married friends who own houses, dogs, etc. I get lots of “extra” produce without all the fuss and trouble.

My one friend has a big bag of tomatoes and long sweet Italian peppers for me waiting as we speak. Mmmmmm. . .stuffed free peppers. . . ::drooling smiley::

5

At my last apartment, I had a vegetable garden, albeit it had tomatoes in it. I lived in a 150 year old house deep in the peninsula of Charleston.

Nothing grew except the tomatoes. And boy, did they grow!

My mom’s theory was that:
A.) Nothing had been planted there in a long time, and
B.) think of how many people must have died around the area, since we’ve had (un)civil war, flood, fire, and earthquakes.

The ground must be pretty rich, she said. Lots of dead people to just fertilize the ground. :eek:

I didn’t eat any of the food I grew. I gave it to my neighbors. :smiley:
So, congrats on the $2.00 Cherry Tomato. At least yours was edible!

6

Where do yo live Rue DeDay? I have many tomatoes growing (The plants grew like crazy) and none close to ripening. Of course we grew them from seeds . . .

7

I hedge my bets and use its’s.

8

I’m too lazy to grow my own tomatoes.
Thankfully someone down the hall in our Professional Services department isn’t. There’s a huge plastic bag full of home grown tomatoes. I shall sneak over there later and pilfer some for my own…
Oh, and I love, love, love grape tomatoes. That would have been what I would have tried to buy, too. Regardless, there’s not much better in the world than a home grown tomato.

Actually, there really is. But it sounds better to say there isn’t.

9

Someone’s just not the ornithologist, now are they, RT? We brought the crows with us. They’re an Old World Species and outcompeted the native crows that made do with Philips head screwdrivers. Don’t you read, man?

Mmmm… Skerri… Dead people vegetables…

And Snickers, everyone knows it’s Windy. But that’s another song. Everyone also knows you can only grow oranges and other citrus fruits down there in Florida. The aligators eat everything else that the mosquitoes don’t get.

10

Oh, I forgot to say:
-Rue. (1600 posts here I come!)

11

Dint you already have 1600 posts once upon a time? I know I just re-hit 2700 a little while ago. What was I gonna say? Oh yeah, you’re train of thought is getting tougher and tougher to follow. It’s almost gotten to the point where I need to graph out the little tangents to figure out where you’re going with any given point.

I wonder if you can get tomato grapes and tomato cherries, just like you can get crayons in both green-yellow and yellow-green. Or maybe I’m just dyslexic.

12

Otamots? Do you want a nocab, ecuttel and otamot sammich? Hey, that sounds pretty good. I wanna be dyslexic!

13

Rue are you sure a squirrel ate your tomato? We bears like tomatoes too and have been know to sneak up and eat people’s tomatoes. Well, actually, what we do is we take the tomato home, wash it, slice it up, then take two pieces of bread, slather mayo all over the bread, put the sliced up tomato on the mayo slathered bread, salt and pepper the sliced up tomato, then eat the tomato sammich while standing over the kitchen sink, cause that’s the only respectable place to eat a tomato sammich. Of course, we wash the sammich down with beer (one of the other bear foods) and sometimes follow it all up with a jar of marshmallow fluff for dessert. We don’t eat marshmallow fluff and tomato sammiches cause marshmallow fluff just don’t taste right with salt and pepper all in it.

I grow tomatoes too. I got big ol’ red tomatoes (beefsteak I think they’re called, though they don’t look like steak, they look like tomatoes), and some of those little yellow tomatoes, whose name I forgot, not that I name each and every tomato, that’d be nuts, besides, then I’d get all attached to em and want to keep em as pets and tomatoes don’t make good pets. I mean, ya can’t teach em to fetch or play frisbee and stuff. Oh and I got some of them little green Mexican type tomatoes (tomatillos they be called). I like me some tomatoes to eat!

I also do a combination of okra, green tomato, banana pepper (which neither looks nor tastes like a banana), and onion all fried together. MMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!! Gooooooood eatin’ for bears and humans alike!

14

Cherry tomatos? Bleah. I can’t think of anything to do with those things except eat 'em straight off the vine or make salads. My dad gave us two plants he didn’t have room for and all I could think was, “What are we gonna do with these.” No problem, though. Yield thus far: zilch.

We also planted two beefsteak-type plants, but thanks to the lovely weather we’ve had the six precious fruits we have so far are stalled in the “little green golf ball” stage.

Only one of the six heads of lettuce is showing any progress, the peppers are doing squat, the eggplant is dropping flowers without producing any fruit, and I could swear that the squash is snickering at me.

In addition, the russian kale with the impronouncable name that she insisted on planting apparently tastes horrible (I won’t try it. It just doesn’t look right). For some reason she refuses to pull it out and plant something useful.

I feel your pain.

15

tomatoes is gross

16

swampbear: what kind of beer do bears drink? Besides, Hamms, of course. And do you always drink from a can or do you sometimes get bottles or draught? I figure it must be tough to hold onto glass with claws, but that could just be an unwarranted assumption.

17

I have two pink plastic flamingos in my back yard, one with wings that spin around in the wind, they’re horribly tacky and I love 'em, please don’t hate me. here endeth the hijack…
-Lil

18

ShibbOleth we bears are not picky about our beer. Our favorite kind is the free kind, of course. I am presently slurping on a couple cases of Natural Light cause it was free. And we look cute holding the cans in our big ol front paws. That’s how we get the free beer, looking so gosh darned cute. The more persnicketty of us will use straws. Cans are preferred but draught or bottle beer is acceptable, specially if it’s free.

19

I am watching my garden pretty closely. My Roma and Beefsteak tomato plants should ripen any day (not a huge tomato person, but love homemade salsa!), my broccoli and red and yellow sweet peppers are coming right along, my cukes should be out soon and last but not least I think I’ll have a few pumpkins for Halloween/pies.

My carrots didn’t do as well, partially because the soil isn’t as good there and partially (I suspect) because of the bunny that’s been hanging around. Ah well, i don’t mind sharing, he’s pretty cute.

20

I don’t know if that’s a hijack; heck, the way these Rue threads go that’s practically on topic.

SB: a friend of mine always referred to “free beer” as “Fred Bear” anyway, so this makes perfect sense to me. I’m sure you’re just the cutest darned thing, sitting in your Lazy Boy and slurping free beer through a straw. Heck, it’s practically a song.