I can do that, I thought. I have the gardening skills level to just toss a tomato plant in the ground. So I pried the remote control out of my
spouse's fist and sent him to buy some tomato plants. He came back with eight of them. I thought it was a pretty good buy since he only paid 50 cents apiece for them. The way I figured it, we would realize between 10 and 20
tomatoes per plant as a conservative estimate, which would give us a cost of about a nickel or less per tomato. Every couple of days I would ask my husband how the tomatoes were doing and he would say, "Fine." Now I must
digress here and tell you that "Fine" is a word of infinite complexity. It means absolutely nothing when a stranger says it, as in:
Me: How are you?
Stranger: Fine, and you?
But it takes on a whole new meaning during a disagreement with my spouse.
Spouse: Well, since you put it that way, I think I'll just sleep right here on the sofa.
Me: Fine!
And there's even another version of the word I use when my children cook for me.
Child: So how do you like the peanut-butter omelet I made for your birthday, Mom?
Me:
(Prying my jaws apart) Fine, just fine.
But when someone says that a tomato plant is "fine" I must confess I consider a "fine" plant means it is still a live plant that is bearing fruit. But everything is relative –
including when a plant is "fine."
I found this out several weeks into the tomato growing season when I asked my spouse where the tomato plants were. They were, he said, on the driveway next to the garage.
Now, I
don't know anything about tomatoes other than they taste great in the summer and lousy in the winter, but even I thought growing tomatoes on a driveway sounded strange. Naïve about all things agricultural, I had somehow supposed
dirt entered the equation somewhere. So I went out to look at the plants and found them – still in the little plastic containers they were in when he bought them. And there were four – count 'em – four green tomatoes the size of
ping pong balls on those eight plants. And I mean total.
Those four were the only tomatoes the plants ever bore. After picking them, my husband, Mr. Green Jeans, tossed the plants out. And we ate them on top of a
salad. They tasted pretty darned good, but then you'd expect them to.
After all, at a dollar apiece, they're some of the most expensive tomatoes ever grown.
