Garden Chat
By Jean Lundquist
Green thumbs, red tempers:
A peek into competitive gardening
T
o people outside the circle of gardeners, it may appear we are all kind-hearted, caring people who just want to feed ourselves, our families and even the community and the world with good, fresh produce. The truth is a little more bloodthirsty than that. I say that in the kindest possible way. But gardening — I’m telling you truthfully — is a very competitive sport. It is true that gardening, and farming, for that matter, are about successfully producing food. As a gardener, it is difficult to put into words the satisfaction that comes from wanting a tomato to put on a hamburger, and finding a sun-warmed specimen that perfectly fits the bill in your own plot. The taste is superior to anything that can be found in a grocery store. Commercial breeders of tomatoes have bred taste out of the fruit by altering the genetic code. It’s somewhat ironic that the same genetic change that causes the tomatoes to ripen uniformly also makes them produce less sugar, making them “somewhat tasteless,” as scientists wrote in their study published this summer. The tastiest tomatoes are now one more thing to compete with other gardeners about. There are many “ugliest tomato” contests to be found. These are almost always about heirloom tomatoes. They 24 • August 2012 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
grow very lumpy and bumpy and asymmetrical, and are considered by many who grow boringly uniform hybrid tomatoes, to be ugly. Yes, I think you now know where I fall on this question. Once I grew an heirloom called Ananais Noir. It was all those heirloom qualities I described above on the outside; but when cut open, it was a blend of mottled colors that included lime green, lemon yellow, orange, pink and red. I cut into an Ananais Noir for a sandwich at work one day at noon, and gushed about what a beautiful tomato I had. A co-worker looked at me as if I had gone mad. I noticed he had brought a carton of those uniformly red, round little cherry tomatoes for lunch — tomatoes I now surmise were also tasteless. It’s not just the ugliest, prettiest or tastiest tomato that gardeners compete about, but also the earliest to ripen. It’s just that competitiveness that led me to grow a tomato called Fourth of July a few years ago. It was not just to have a nice ripe tomato by early July, as I believe I wrote about here; it was also to be able to brag about it. Even amateur gardeners catch the competitive spirit early on. A friend who just a few years ago laughed at me when I paid attention to the names of the tomatoes and beans I planted, telling me, “A tomato is a tomato,” this year called me special to say she had put her green beans and tomato plants in the first of May. Did I have mine in yet, she wanted to know. I chided her again for being an amateur, and told her she’d jumped the gun and would be frozen out, needing to replant. Well that, of course, didn’t happen. So in early July, she emailed me to tell me she had picked an ice cream pail of green beans and wondered if I was eating my green beans yet. I was not, and her response was something along the lines of, “OK, master gardener!” If you need more evidence of competitive gardening, I invite you to look to your local county fair. Pay attention to conversations among those who obviously
did not make an entry into the open class vegetable or flower entries. You’ll undoubtedly hear snippets like this: “Can you believe this won?” And, “I should have brought MY cauliflower if this is the best the rest could come up with!” Or maybe, “There are bug bites out of that hosta leaf, and they gave it a ribbon?” In the grains divisions of some local fairs, there has been speculation that a winning entry was saved to enter again the following year. That called for some creative ways to make sure that every entry was grown within that year. Confetti and glitter were added to the jars, making it impossible to remove in order to re-enter the same specimen the following year. I believe the entrants said they were offended, at the time. And moving up the chain a step to home canning (drying and cooking with garden produce), just imagine the conversations about different recipes for salsa, and which hot pepper is THE ONE to use! M Jean Lundquist is a master gardener who lives near Good Thunder.