Tomatoes: A Heartwarming and Epic Tale of Overcoming Adversity

Thought I would share this little story with you all, since many of you are gardeners and might appreciate it. I'm hoping Disney will buy the film rights to this thrilling little barnburner (whatever that means).

It all began way back in 2008, when I was planning a garden in Lawrence, Kansas. I ordered three packets of heirloom tomato seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company that spring. (They were "Green  Zebra," "Fox Cherry," and "Dad's Sunset.") As fate would have it, I accepted a job in Tulsa that March and moved to a wonderful apartment - but an apartment where no tomato seeds could be planted. So I set aside those seeds, and they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until this spring when Tom and I were planning a garden in our yard here in Kentucky.

Common sense would suggest that three year old seeds would never start, but what the heck? Will and I spent a lovely spring afternoon planting the seeds into little pots, with little expectation of yielding any real plants. Then I put some damp newspaper over the pots, stuck them on top of the refrigerator, and forgot about them.

About 10 days later, Tom said, "Hey, whatever happened to those seeds you guys planted?" I shrugged and lifted up the newspaper. Much to my surprise:

Eureka! Weak, tiny little sprouts were struggling to find light in their newspaper cave. Like an emergency responder, I rushed them over to our reading lamp and dribbled my drinking water over the starts. As you can see, they were pretty puny, but I kept the lamp on them for 16 hours each day, and the following week, they looked like this:

Well, these comeback kids were blowing my mind. Still, I didn't expect them to survive in those little containers for long. Like kids, when they got a little older and bigger, we decided they were ready for their own room - er - yogurt cup. Spring turned into summer, and the little plants grew into honest-to-goodness transplants. We gave some away, then selected the strongest of the rest to put in the ground:

It was just great to have the lovely smell of tomato plants in the yard. If they didn't yield any fruit, that was ok. But it was more than ok that they did!

By now, it was mid-July, and time for us to go on vacation to Florida. (This is the dramatic part of the story.) We forgot to ask our neighbors to water the plants. Would our tomato plants survive, all alone, for the better part of two weeks, during the hottest time of year? (Granted, our weather has not been nearly as brutal as it has been in Oklahoma, and we have had more regular rainfall.)

We came home from our vacation late at night. While Will, Emory and I were flopping into our beds with exhaustion, Tom was racing to the backyard to check on the plants. And guess what?

So there you have it, folks. Without much encouragement from us (in fact, you could say I did pretty much everything within my power to kill these plants, from seed to fruit), and even without fertilizer of any sort, these unlikely little seeds grew up to produce some tasty tomatoes.

Morals of the story:

1. Nature doesn't really need us as much as we think it does.
2. I am a terrible gardener. It's a good thing I don't live in a place like New England, where you have to have some great skill to grow food.
3. Always give the benefit of the doubt, whether it's to another person or to a three year old tomato seed!

(No, that's not a scar, that's a crayon mark, but it does make for a more dramatic conclusion, doesn't it?)