Strega Nona’s Tomato Vines

Even though Daddy had a giant garden on our land in Virginia, one where each spring he’d put a shovel full of horse manure from the barn in a hole under each tomato cage, even though Momma every fall would pickle and can and freeze and preserve, and even though throughout the summer I’d sit with a friend atop the brick curved column thingys at the entrance to our road, hawking five-gallon buckets full of the veggies no one in my family ever wanted to see again, I still don’t know a single thing about growing a garden. Not to be too dramatic, but Daddy died, then Mom and I moved to the suburbs, and I just never learned.  

Once I entered the ranks of American homeowners (how long until this is even a dream of the middle class, again?) I still didn’t garden with gusto: I had a job and a child and too many trees in the yard to do much other than plant each spring and wish.  

Until now. Now that I’m retired and living in a house that stays where you put it, I’m all excited about gardening. The backyard here has lots of sun, and there even was a raised bed when we moved in. And, I have time!

When The Cottage was built, I moved the raised bed out of its way and into a seemingly good spot to form a row for several future raised beds. I filled it with the proper layers of cardboard and yard debris, then plain dirt, mostly dug up when Tracy dug the holes for my laundry line posts. 

This spring as I was walking my new neighborhood, I started seeing tomato seedlings in sidewalk sales. Kind of like yard sales, but people who had grown plants from seeds, in their basements or garages with grow lights, put them on tables with signs indicating types, along with a Venmo QR code. Apparently this is very much a thing here, seeing as how I saw a ton of them. So, I picked up one or two plants for maybe $3 each. Then, as people started planting their own backyard urban gardens here, they noticed they had too many of whatever plants, so they’d just put their extra seedlings straight on the sidewalk, along with the kazillion other things people put out for free here in this trade/barter/give-away town I love. So, I took three or four more.

I ended up with five tomato plants and one poblano (Tracy doesn’t like fresh veggies!) and put them in my new raised bed. This was all gonzo-style, like I do almost everything. I paid maybe $7 for all of it, including some cages I also grabbed from the sidewalk here, and I expected very little to come from the whole endeavor. I didn’t even water but when I thought of it, and I added fertilizer once or twice. 

Along comes Audrey II. You know, the man-eating plant from The Little Shop of Horrors? These free plants from sidewalks around town grew so fast and furious that they’re toppled over the tomato cages, bent the stakes I’d stuck in there (found in the back of the yard) and basically became a tangled jungle of no return. 

I emailed Midwest Mark’s wife, Tara, because I know she grows tomatoes, and I contacted Mary Margaret, my pro chef friend in France who was taking a gardening class in Versailles, of all places. 

“I can just leave these as they are, right? I mean, it’s too late to do anything about their possible man-eating mess, right?” 

Both said unequivocally “NO,” that I needed to get them in order asap. This was merely June, and the plants had plenty of time to produce good fruit, but only if I thinned them. MM even sent me a video of a guy in Maryland thinning a tomato patch, and he was ruthless! Trim! Stake! Those suckers need air and light! 

So, I told Tracy what I was doing in case he came looking for me and I wasn’t around—I’d be in the midst of the horrors of my one raised bed. And I did trim with the handy branch cutters Tracy had bought from Habitat ReStore, and I righted cages and tied them to my new laundry line posts, using anything i could come up with. Not kidding: I have shoe laces and the tire innertube from when I got a flat during that Phish show—anything and everything is tied up to those cages and vines and the cross trees of the laundry line. It’s like some kind of gardening parkour puzzle.  

And, it worked. Come August, I had regular red tomatoes from the standard plant I picked up for free, plus green striped ones from the plant labeled Berkeley TieDye, plus big, round, bright yellow ones called Moon Glow, and the sweetest little yellow cherry ones called Sun Gold that taste like candy. There’s something else in there that makes a pretty, red tomato that I didn’t even catch the name of when I grabbed the seedlings off the street. 

Here’s the thing. THEY KEEP COMING. My nextdoor neighbor hung a wire egg basket on our shared fence, and I’d put tomatoes in each day then cover them with a cloth to try to fool the squirrels and I’d switch to her fence side. Every day I did this, until I received a text asking me to stop. “My god, too many tomatoes,” she said! 

I started putting them on a table by the sidewalk (I’d grabbed the table from a set of furniture set on the sidewalk a block down). I’d put them out with a paper plate where I’d scribble “Free!” The plate would be gone in a few minutes along with the tomatoes, so I stopped bothering to scribble notes. Sometimes, the tomatoes would be gone by the time I came back with more, just a minute later. I took those photos of what was left after I stepped back to the yard for a minute to grab more tomatoes.

My new renting neighbor, Reynaldo, told me he eats them with eggs every morning before he plays soccer (he said this while wearing a soccer uniform, no joke). My plumber neighbor Manny told me he takes so many that he has started to make himself wait a few minutes after he sees me put them out, to give someone else a fighting chance. 

Here’s the thing though. The plants keep. on. making. tomatoes. Over and over. I eat them (the only proper way, on fresh bread with Duke’s mayo and salt). My neighbors eat them. I snack on the cherries. I put the cherries in little snack bags and my neighbors snack on them. I lift up a vine that’s dragging the ground and find five more. I dig through some vines that grew around the old woodpile and find ten more.  

I even found the pepper plant! That poblano I’d planted along with the tomatoes is thriving, with ten peppers on it right now. 

I keep laughing when I put the fruit at the sidewalk and neighbor walk by, and we exchange something that we try to make witty, but how many times can you say the same thing and still express surprise? That’s when I remembered Strega Nona’s Pasta Pot.

My niece, Katherine, was the first baby on both sides of the family and very much cherished; we all bought her a kazillion books and read to her all the danged time. Then she got mysteriously ill and spent tons of time in hospitals, so we read even more. Her books got passed down to Finn, and Finn passed them to his cousin Dalton, and he passed them to his cousin Max. Somewhere in all those books is Tomie Paola’s Strega Nona.  

This delightful picture book tells the standard tale of a ne’re-do-well apprentice to a magical person who gets a hold of a spell and wrecks havoc through ineptitude. I can’t remember what the young man in the small Italian town wanted in this version, but what he got was a pot that produced so much pasta that it filled up his cottage and spilled into the streets and threatened to do real damage to the entire village. Finally, Strega Nona came home and straightened things out, just in the nick of time.

Seeing as how I do not want to spend a minute in my kitchen this glorious summer, canning, nor do I have room in a freezer because of the looking renovations, nor do I care enough to, again, spend time in my kitchen cooking tomato sauce or salsa or whatever for the food bank down the street, I’m guessing those are my ne’re-do-well traits that have gotten me in this pickle. My one raised bed, my five plants I picked up off the street like little urchins, my weird, random dirt gathered from Tracy’s assorted yard work this spring, all have produced a never-ending bunch of tomato vines that might just eat me like Audrey II.

The real question is: What will I plant next year when I have three more beds?