TOMATO PERSON

by Lisa Rask

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you will spend parts of chilly days thinking about planting them. On the days a foot of snow falls, you will remind yourself that Mother’s Day will come, the ground will thaw, and you will be able to plant in soft earth, no snow for miles. You might pore over seed catalogs to start them yourself and devote a section of your home to their germination. You might buy starts instead and babysit them for weeks when the weather is moody and the wind is like a bully to tender, hopeful sprouts. You will plan their outside visits. They will harden; you will be proud. You will tell other tomato people about their progress, but you may edit out the part where you killed some by forgetting them outside or shocked them by letting them get too dry.

You will watch the calendar and the temperature, you will look for social media evidence that serious gardeners have taken the leap, and you will finally plant your tomatoes, placing cloches or other protection such as coffee cans or milk jugs around them. My family’s method employs old wooden shingles. They surround the babies with protection until they are ready for big, open cages. First, you place them tightly around, and as the plants strengthen and grow, you widen the surrounding, eventually removing them and storing them until next year.

The cedar shingles first lived on top of Chimney Butte school, situated just north of Stone Lutheran Church in Morton County. This church and graveyard are near the family farm and homestead, and my dad still has the keys. My brother was the last baby baptized at Stone. The final church bulletin is still in the foyer, and each time we visit we look for his name and remark about time passing. My sister and my grandparents and other relatives are buried there. As a child I was spooked and thrilled that my last name was on so many of the headstones. My dad and grandpa tore down the old school in 1973 and saved and carried away the shingles in old feed bags. Later that summer they reroofed their hog house with them, keeping some for use in the gardens. Dad gave me a box of the shingles when I bought a house, and, each time I place them around a new little plant, I think about how many times they have served this purpose and in how many North Dakota gardens they have provided shelter. Even if you brush off the dirt when you pull them out, there is always a little left over from the seasons before.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you will excitedly watch for blooms and vibrate with excitement as they begin to appear on the vines. You will yell into the house that it is happening, and you will try to predict which plant will be the busiest. Your cautious hand watering may give way to the overhead sprinkler. Maybe you will carefully prune and direct the vines in a cage or support structure. Maybe you will give up pruning and let them take over everything. Maybe the weeds are frequently pulled, or maybe they grow in tandem with the vines. But when you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, your family members become tomato growers too. Likely against their will.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, there comes a time when there are probably too many, and you start to take them for granted. You regret your life choices, and you openly judge that naïve, hopeful spring version of yourself who believed that any of this was a good idea. You wonder why you forget (in less than a year’s time!) how big a tomato plant can get. You might angrily rake up the fallen tomatoes you could not get to in time while cursing your May enthusiasm. You might announce to your family that you are only planting four plants next year. You might declare that you will never again plant a cherry tomato variety. You are lying to yourself and your family.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, and there are huge quantities of them available to you for several weeks on end (and you have them in some fashion for most meals), you have the luxurious privilege of being able to lazily cut off the whole end rather than paring tightly around the core when buying that single tomato from the store in February. Your cutting boards will run with bright juice for months on end. You will make enemies with fruit flies. You will startle when the dried vine top that fell off in the bowl reminds you of a spider. All available counters will house trays of them in various states of ripening if there is an impending hard freeze. You might give some to people you believe will enjoy them as much as you do.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you might one day walk into a slug horror show and learn about how strong your will is to keep this thing going. You may reach for a tomato and instead sink your fingers into a smelly, wet globe whose decay you could not first see. Or you might go out in a light rain to grab tomatoes for canning and meet the most gigantic spider you have ever seen, holding court on one of the plants. One day there is a plant that grows and grows and grows but is otherwise barren of fruit.

You will pull it out. It will make you think of holding your newborn in the hospital and seeing a priest walk out of your neighbor’s room, realizing that the baby did not make it. You will see the empty space for the rest of the season and wonder, “Why that one?” There will come a time you lose a whole plant to disease. You will think about how the garden mimics birth, life, and death.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you watch the weather, you weed, water, prune, amend, pick, clean, prep, cook, and plan how to put them by. Sometimes you are so swamped by the late August heat and humidity that you freeze some whole to save your sanity. You wash jars and rings and source lids. You pressure cook huge batches of spaghetti sauce. Sometimes you must force your family to help you cover plants with sheets or blankets in the sneaky spring or in unpredictable October, and you keep watching the weather. And you worry. There is almost inevitably a day or two when you rush to gather everything before a killing frost. There will be a year you do it with a flashlight in the dark. There may be a year when you are too exhausted or overwhelmed to gather or protect them, or some other priority comes up. It might be hard for you to accept that you could not get them in time, and you might carry the regret around far longer than is needed or useful. When the plants die, the bright green of the vine is simply gone after the frost steals its life.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, one day there are simply no more. All the plants have been pulled, the cages are stowed, the hoses are inside, and there are no bowls or trays or pesky fruit flies. You will look at the garden you watched explode with life, and you will see the bare ground and feel relief and sadness. There may be some cherished jars of tomatoes, summertime bottled and waiting in the pantry. But the bounty is over. The part of the grocery store you have completely ignored for months will come back into view. And you will even buy them sometimes. You are, after all, a tomato person. But you might grimace when you feel how tough it cuts, and you might think about how wan it looks compared to the impossibly bright red of your garden tomatoes. You will pull out your phone and find photos to prove how red yours were to your partner who nods with understanding, having already heard this over and over. This is the moment when you may start to rethink that tomato retirement announcement you made when you were overwhelmed.

Tomatoes have a way of mightily asserting themselves even when you have not been a good gardener. They offer metaphors about hope, tenacity, and incremental change. They make you think about your powerlessness over nature and how we must find acceptance with the unexpected. How small your control really is, no matter how tight your grip. Sometimes your energy matches the garden, the weeds are pulled, and you feel proud and capable. Sometimes the garden spins out of control, the weeds take over, and you feel guilty and ashamed. But the tomatoes keep growing.

Nothing charms me more in the garden than when a volunteer plant from a forgotten, dropped, overripe tomato makes its way into existence the following year. Except that first little bloom. Or the grappling vine on the cage. Or the first barely red cherry, eaten right there in the garden. Or the plants, all heavy with fruit. Or the first seriously dense slice on sourdough. Or jars lined up in the pantry. When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, it is not really a hobby. Maybe “avocation” is a better word. Our house has a break from them for a while now, and because of the wait and the wonder, come spring and summer, I will be ready to welcome them again in their time. l

LISA RASK lives in Bismarck with her family and posts too many Instagram stories of her cooking. If food were a love language, she would speak Tomato. A lazy pruner, she spends her time each summer in complete awe of what magic will go ahead and happen anyway even if she does not get to the weeds on time. (This is a lesson from the tomatoes about self-compassion.)