SOME OF THE BEST TOMATOES COME FROM THE COMPOST PILE

I've been a gardener most of my life, I figure.  My dad always had a garden, so I was introduced to gardening at an early age. 

I can't honestly say I enjoyed working in my dad's garden as a youth because my major responsibility at that time was to remove weeds and rocks -- we lived in Southwest Missouri on the edge of the Ozark Mountains where rocks are born and grow.  Being in the garden, however, allowed me the privilege of getting to be first to eat a tomato fresh off the vine, to savor the young peas in a not-fully-developed pea pod, or to yank a tender young carrot from the ground, wipe off the dirt on my overalls and eat it right there. 

I still love fresh vegetables.  When I got my own place after college, I immediately cleared an area for my vegetable garden.

In recent years I could not maintain the garden I previously did because I was gone during a big part of the summer.  I gradually replaced seasonal crops with annual ones: rhubarb, horseradish, raspberries, and green onions.  The rest of the garden was covered with black plastic to keep the weeds at bay.

We are sticking closer to home this season due to an upcoming wedding involving our oldest granddaughter, so I had the opportunity to plant more seasonal vegetables.  When I brought in my first red tomato the other day I was reminded of the several summers we enjoyed the delicious, huge Big Boy tomatoes that came from no less a place than my dad's compost pile.

Dad taught me the value of maintaining a compost pile.  Grass clippings, pulled weeds, hedge clippings, and even the valuable stuff we now flush down the drain via our garbage disposals.  All of these items decompose and all have valuable nutrients that can be returned to the garden soil to enrich it for next season's garden.  Dad was doing organic gardening before the term became popular.

Well, early one summer before dad had turned the compost pile over he noticed a tomato plant coming up in one corner.  It had clearly come up from a seed that had survived the winter and he decided to let it grow.  It produced some of the biggest, meatiest tomatoes we had ever seen, tomatoes of the Big Boy variety that he had grown the previous season.  Big Boy tomatoes are a hybrid tomato and hybrids don't usually reproduce well from seed.  This one did, however, and dad decided to save some of the seeds that fall.  He shared some of those with me and I started my own tomato plants the following spring.

We were pleased to have the seedlings develop into healthy tomato vines, even though they have been transplanted from their "native" Ozark region to the Zone 5 region in upstate New York.  The vines grew big and strong and produced for us the same robust tomatoes they had for my dad.  We were now working with the fourth generation of seeds from the original plant, so we were not only pleased but a little surprised.

Those tomatoes were delicious!  We had more tomatoes than we could eat that summer, which is unusual since everyone in the family likes fresh tomatoes.

I saved some of the seeds from one of the healthiest tomatoes in mid-summer to use the follow spring.  Seedlings from those seeds grew as expected and the resulting tomato plants once again grew healthy and strong.  But!

We noticed one little problem with our tomatoes that summer.  They were big and red and solid throughout, but some of the solidness came from a hard green core that had developed and they were more misshapen than round.  After cutting out the core and slicing, we had a big odd shaped slice of tomato with a big hole in the middle.  They were still delicious but a pain to prepare.

When I checked with my dad back in Missouri I learned that he was experiencing the same thing.  The tomatoes were apparently beginning to revert to some of the original stock from which the Big Boy hybrid had been developed.

We gave up on the strain after that summer, but I always remember those two seasons when we had some of the tastiest tomatoes you could ever want -- and they came from the compost pile.

And get this, the other day after turning my compost pile I noticed a young tomato plant coming up next to the wall.  You know, I just had to let it grow.  We'll see what develops later in the summer.  It may be another tomato surprise.