The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  While harvesting for me is more of a family (if not solitary) affair, not a community one, I still feel the power and magic of the moment. We do have one small ritual of our own, Katie and I, when we harvest potatoes. By the end of summer, we have been “stealing” potatoes regularly, rummaging around in the soil to snatch a handful for dinner, but once the foliage has died off, it’s time to collect the rest. I always call Katie out to the garden to help. After pitchforking most of them out of the ground, we dig through the soil with our bare hands, feeling blindly for the remainder, getting wonderfully dirty in the process. Katie excels at this job, for neither maturity nor strength offers an advantage. Without fail we play a game we first started when she was six. Katie declares there are no more potatoes to be found, and I tell her there’s always one more, and to prove it we dig around some more until one of us comes up with another one. “Well, that’s the last one for sure,” Katie says. “Let’s go inside.” I say, “I’ll bet you there’s one more,” because there’s always one more, and we dig some more, and sure enough we find another one. I always make sure Katie finds the final one of the harvest.

  She wants to be logical. “Dad, how can there always be one more? That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t know—there just is,” I answer insufficiently. I want to be mystical. Things happen in the garden. “There’s always one more” has become our code phrase, our shared secret knowledge between father and daughter, and we use it outside the garden as well, but sparingly, so as not to sap its power.

  Rituals are as old as civilization. They provide comfort and safety. Insurance against tragedy. For as long as a child must dig the last potato of the season, kneeling beside her father, laughing “there’s always one more,” how could harm possibly come to her? The extinction of a life is tragic; the extinction of a ritual seems unthinkable, impossible.

  Thus throughout the world, harvest is ritual. For the gentleman farmer or backyard gardener, it is something more, a feeling that is hard to describe. It is, to borrow an overused word, one of empowerment. Once I started harvesting, I was no longer a hunter-gatherer (at the local grocery store); I was now a farmer, providing food that I had raised from minuscule seeds for myself and my family. It’s almost too much to grasp.

  SOMETIMES THERE IS LITERALLY too much to grasp. Be careful what you wish for. The problem is, unless you are really disciplined at staggered planting (I’m not) and have a long-enough season for it (for most crops, I don’t), when your crops come in, they come in more or less all at once. How many zucchini can you eat over a two-week period? How many cucumbers? When you can’t consume all of it, you must store it, preserve it, or give it away.

  We’ve always done a little of each. In addition to canning peaches, each summer we make enough sweet pickles and wineberry jam to last the entire year, with enough left over for wonderful Christmas presents. Recipients always appreciate receiving canned fruit and jam both because of the quality of it and because it is such a personalized gift. It is clearly something that you labored over. However, I’ve always been a bit self-conscious about giving away fresh produce because of a certain ambiguity that hangs in the air about whether it’s the receiver or the giver who’s doing the other the favor. To look at it another way, when does “giving” become “dumping”? Let’s face it, when you have thirty pounds of zucchini hanging off your vines, each one doubling in size every twenty-four hours, giving a bagful to your neighbors is not exactly a moving show of generosity. And one is never sure what the neighbor is going to do with it. Have you ever been offered zucchini or a bag of tomatoes from someone who themselves received it from someone? I have, and always feel embarrassment for the anonymous gardener who doesn’t suspect his merchandise is being passed around behind his back. Of course, when the gift is a bagful of juicy, ripe peaches or just-picked strawberries, one hopes that the quality of the fruit, not the abundance of it, is the message that comes across.

  Never has this mixed message been better illustrated—or more awkwardly handled—than by my jogging partner, Scott, himself an avid gardener. For years, before I had a garden of my own, Scott subjected me to an uncomfortable weekly ritual, one that I imagine was repeated with other friends of his as well. It went like this: After each workout, Scott would offer me either zucchini or cucumbers from his garden. Then he would lead me into his kitchen, where he and his wife would start digging through the refrigerator, examining the week’s vegetables. Each vegetable wore a small swatch of masking tape with what I presume was the date of harvest written on it. Scott or his wife would pull out a cuke, glance at the date, then sometimes put it back and sometimes drop it in my sack, after first ripping off the tape. I assumed for years that the purpose of this system was to ensure that guests got only fresh vegetables and (like McDonald’s, which puts a little toy clock above the coffee warmer stating the time that the coffee must be discarded) to guarantee that old vegetables were discarded, not eaten.

  Silly me. Scott and his wife let the cat out of the bag one evening when they started arguing—right in front of me—over which cucumber to give me. As Scott was dropping one into the bag, his wife interrupted.

  “Wait, not that one,” she said in an alarmed voice.

  Not that one? My ears pricked up. I peered over Scott’s shoulder. The cucumber was dated yesterday.

  “I think we have another one.” “I don’t think so,” Scott insisted.

  Another one? I don’t think so? What on earth were they talking about in this code? These were cucumbers, not diamonds.

  “No, I’m telling you,” his wife insisted, getting angry.

  Now I started to feel awkward. I was standing in their kitchen after a hard workout, sweaty and smelly, and being subjected to a marital argument over which cucumber—retail value, approximately thirty cents—to give me.

  She reached in and pulled out an older-dated cucumber, and then it dawned on me: the dates were part of a rotation system to ensure that cucumbers were used on a first-in, first-out basis, the way your grocer moves the freshest bread to the back of the shelf. Now, didn’t I feel special! I don’t mind ShopRite’s doing it, but I’d like to think my jogging partner and longtime friend would give me the freshest his garden had to offer, not the stalest.

  Maybe I had misconstrued Scott’s motives because I do the opposite—to a fault—when giving crops away. When I bring apples into work, or give the neighbors peaches or tomatoes or strawberries, I want to put my best foot forward, so I end up giving away only unblemished fruit, leaving my poor family with the bottom of the barrel. As a consequence, we end up making a lot of applesauce while the neighbors are eating the good stuff. Admittedly this is kind of insane, but the alternatives—keeping everything or pawning flawed fruit off on neighbors—are not attractive, either.

  Even an act as seemingly straightforward as bringing in garden roses for my office mates can send me on tiptoe through a minefield of social etiquette and office politics. Once, I brought in a couple of my English roses for a colleague who had done me a favor. She didn’t have anything to put them in, so I fetched from my office a ceramic bud vase that Anne had given me years ago. A week went by, and the roses faded, and another week passed. Then a third went by, and the roses shriveled and turned brown but still remained in the vase. My vase. This raised two intriguing questions in my mind: Why was she keeping brown, shriveled roses on her desk, and was I ever going to get my vase—a prized gift from my wife—back? Did she think I was giving her the vase with the roses? After all, I was thanking her, but I wasn’t wooing her. I needed a smooth way to get my vase back without embarrassing either of us.

  I mentioned my dilemma over dinner.

  “Why don’t you go into her office,” Zach suggested, “and say, ‘My, look at those faded roses. Let me see if I can’t do something for you,’ and take the vase and dead roses out with you. She’ll think you’re coming back with fresh roses, and you get your vase back.”

  It worked like a charm, although it was not lo
st on either Zach or me that I was relying on my teenager for social advice. He had flipped the parent-child table on me yet again. But it was gratifying to see he possessed such social skills, much better than mine. This apple of mine seems to have fallen far from the tree.

  Who would have thought that the act of giving could be so complicated? Yet it turns out that keeping produce is even harder.

  The first couple of years that the apple trees bore fruit, we had nice, manageable crops that lasted us two or three weeks—joyous weeks of fresh, crisp apples eaten out of hand, fresh applesauce, and almost nightly pies, tarts, cobblers, and pandowdies. But as the orchard matured (and my use of insecticide grew bolder), my dream of bushels of apples came true—and with it came the realization that I hadn’t given much thought to storage. A hundred pounds of apples is a lot of pandowdy. We had to come up with a way to store the apples.

  When kept chilled and humid, apples can be stored in excellent condition for months. In fact, some apples, including the Grimes Golden that I grow, actually improve after a few weeks of chilling. But there was no room in our refrigerator for more than a couple of dozen apples. In previous years, I had experimented with natural cold storage in crawl spaces and the like. What I learned was that unless one has a deep root cellar (think mine shaft), this is a difficult proposition in the Hudson Valley. Empire apples, for example, ripen in late September, when it is still fairly warm—technically summer, in fact. Nevertheless I tried to store the apples naturally. This turned out to be an exhausting and unrewarding task.

  At harvest time, the interior of our little barn was cooler than the outside air. In fact, a small room in the back corner of the barn was once used to store ice harvested from the Hudson River. The river was once home to a thriving ice industry, employing scores of men who cut through river ice with large handsaws and loaded the blocks onto horse-drawn wagons, to be taken through the valley into storage warehouses or private homes for use throughout the following year. Our “icehouse” is about five by eight feet, with six inches of sawdust insulation in the walls and a vent in the roof to allow excess moisture to escape.

  It seemed like an excellent place to store apples. Perhaps it would have been had I first filled it with a couple of tons of Hudson River ice. As soon as the inevitable October warm spell hit, the temperature of the icehouse rose into the seventies, so I lugged all of the apples up the hill to a crawl space under the house, where it was cooler. The rats and mice and who knows what else really appreciated the unexpected delivery of these snacks, so a few weeks later when I discovered the damage, I moved what was left of the apples back to the barn, which had cooled down by then. This worked fine until the really cold weather came, and the unheated barn dropped below freezing. Frozen apples are no good. So back came the apples, 150 feet up the hill, a box at a time, now making their fourth trip between the barn and the house, where I stored them in a corner of the basement. Because of all of the exposed steam pipes snaking through the basement, it stays fairly toasty, but this corner was at least less toasty than the others.

  By late December, I finally placed the source of the faint smell of cider that I had been noticing for a while. I retrieved the apples and threw out the worst of the worst, and Anne made applesauce with the rest. The net result of several months of moving apples from site to site like hot dice in a floating crap game was lots of mush and a few gallons of slightly musty-tasting applesauce.

  Which is why the following year, with several bushels of apples hanging on our trees, I thought maybe it was time to splurge on a refrigerator to hold the harvest. We did a little looking around and found that it was going to cost close to five hundred dollars for a refrigerator large enough—eighteen cubic feet—to hold our annual crop. Now, granted, my apples are special. Though not organic by any stretch of the imagination, they are sprayed with far fewer (and less toxic) pesticides than commercial apples and, to my palate, taste far superior as well. I’m not sure I have ever tasted any apple finer than a Grimes Golden, with its perfect balance of sweet and tart, crispy and juicy. But is it worth spending five hundred dollars to have them through the winter? Not if you judge by market prices. We hemmed and hawed on the issue for weeks as harvest day drew near. Then when Anne pointed out that around Thanksgiving, when we typically entertain up to twenty-five family members, she often finds herself in need of an extra fridge, that cinched the deal. I didn’t want to spend five hundred dollars to store a hundred dollars’ worth of apples, but as long as we had another use for it …

  We set the refrigerator up in the basement, turned the thermostat as low as it would go, and loaded it with apples stuffed into gallon bags that I had peppered with holes. Perforated bags seemed to provide a good compromise between holding moisture in and allowing enough out so that the apples don’t rot. We filled the refrigerator to the brim. There were bags on the shelves, bags in the vegetable and fruit bins, bags on the door. Quite a sight. Opening the door was always a shock, no matter how many times I did it. But the biggest shock came when I realized that Thanksgiving was approaching, and the refrigerator was still packed to the gills with apples. Revelation time: apple harvest and Thanksgiving are both in the fall! There wouldn’t be room in the refrigerator for a turkey or anything else on Thanksgiving. What on earth were we thinking? Had we confused Thanksgiving with Easter?

  Looking back today, I don’t regret buying the fridge, as we eat fresh apples from our orchard into March of the following year.

  For many winter-storage crops—potatoes, winter squash, onions—the moisture in the refrigerator would be as fatal as the warmth in the basement. These vegetables (okay, the squash, like the tomato, is botanically a fruit) prefer a cool, dry, and dark environment. Since Saharan caves are in short supply in the Hudson Valley, I didn’t expect to have much success, but we’ve done surprisingly well storing potatoes and shallots—a member, like onions, of the genus Allium—in the basement, warm as it is. We hang the shallots in bunches and use them all winter long. Keeping another allium, the leek, through the winter is another story.

  I love leeks. Not only do they make really great soup on a cold winter’s night, but growing leeks makes me feel positively medieval. Unlike those New World discoveries potatoes and tomatoes, leeks are the stuff of monks and maidens. In fact, their cultivation goes back a millennium or two farther than that.

  To keep leeks over the winter, you leave them right in the ground. They will not keep long in the refrigerator (or out of it), but will keep in the garden almost indefinitely if you can prevent the ground from freezing. So one late fall day, I tried the standard garden formula found in many garden books and covered the leek bed with twelve inches of straw, surrounded by a little fence of burlap that I made to keep the straw contained. When I was done, the bed had been transformed into a thick swath of yellow straw punctuated by the bulbous leek tops sticking through, waving in the wind like cheerleader pom-poms.

  On a frigid mid-January evening, with a craving for a steaming bowl of leek soup, I trudged into the garden with a flashlight and a hand trowel, cleared away the straw from the base of one leek, and struck the earth with the trowel. Boingggg! The ground was frozen solid. I tried a couple of more spots: all frozen solid. Putting the hand trowel aside, I retrieved the spade from its winter hibernation and attacked the frozen earth. No go. It was like digging into granite. I didn’t get the leeks out of the ground until a warm spell in February, when, in the kitchen, they thawed into a mushy, unappetizing mess. It was a total loss. “Twelve inches of straw will protect your soil from freezing,” the book had said. Where? In Tallahassee? The book also neglected to mention that in the spring I would be faced with a massive cleanup job, as bits of straw had found their way into every nook and cranny of the garden. Even today, years later, I find bits of the stuff, an unwelcome reminder of the Year of the Frozen Leek.

  I guess if I want to be harvesting leeks in January, I should really build a cold frame, which is like a mini-greenhouse. All you do is salvage an old
window and build a wooden frame around it. Then just keep the glass free of snow, and you have a toasty little microclimate for cool-weather crops. It is said that with such a setup, one can grow crops like lettuce, leeks, and carrots almost twelve months of the year, even in the Northeast.

  I have a large window I’ve been saving for years in the basement for such a purpose, but I just can’t get myself to make the commitment. In the abstract, I love the idea of being able to eat my own greens twelve months out of the year, not just the five or six I manage now, but I’m not sure I want to be raising lettuce twelve months of the year. By October (if not months sooner), I’m all gardened out. I’m ready to put the damn beds to bed. And I don’t think year-round gardening would be good for my psyche. I need some time to recharge, to be fallow myself, to review the successes and mistakes of the past year, and to make plans for the next. I need that time when the garden is quiet and the seed catalogs arrive and for a few months the garden becomes an abstract, a blank canvas, waiting quietly in anticipation of the new. The closest I want to be to my garden in January is opening a jar of peaches, hearing that satisfying pop when the vacuum seal is broken.

  JANUARY PEACHES ARE SOWN in August. Thus on this long summer night, surrounded by pots of boiling water and steam, Anne and I continued canning peaches—peeling, slicing, packing. As the silence in the kitchen grew, I tried to understand what was happening. Neither of us wanted to say anything aloud, but after nearly twenty years of marriage, our nonverbal communication was often sufficient. Our lives were changing, catching up on us. The solitary, noncommunity harvest had become the perfect metaphor for our lives. As we were becoming more self-sufficient in terms of food, we were simultaneously becoming more self-sufficient and insular in other ways. We had started spending holidays quietly at home instead of traveling to be with family or turning out huge dinners for twenty-five. We turned down invitations to parties. Stopped going to church. Just a month earlier, we had broken our “orphan rule”—our somewhat neurotic policy of never both getting on the same plane without the kids—for the first time and flown to Europe, just the two of us, realizing we no longer had forever.