Empty Nester

Well...not really. But eight of my baby tomato plants did go off to their new home today. I had been growing quite a few extras to trade to a friend who has a larger garden. In exchange for some of her produce, I was to provide some heirloom tomato plants that I started from seed. So today she stopped by, and went home with five Amish Paste tomato plants, two Burbank Reds, and one mystery tomato that volunteered itself from seed from last year--my guess is that it's a cherry tomato, or a Roma.

I'd been more and more concerned over the condition of my tomatoes--they were turning yellow or olive green and yellow, they were thin and spindly, and some of their leaves were curling, drying, turning purple on the undersides, or a combination of the above. After looking up a few things on the Internet, I determined that it was probably a mineral deficiency. A couple of days ago, we gave them some Miracle Grow, and by this evening, the leaves were visibly improving. The green leaves were greener, and even some of the yellow leaves were showing signs of returning green. So...lesson learned. Small potted tomatoes will likely need feeding; the small amount of soil they're growing in will likely run out of nutrients before the weather has warmed enough for them to go out in the garden. Tomorrow I'm going to prepare the main planting bed for them. I've already put in some crushed eggshell to help with calcium content; the next step is to get some of that good compost we've been cooking for the past couple of years and work it into the soil, then add some of the topsoil we bought for the other planting beds--we're going to have a bunch extra. Then I'll put in my tomatoes and peppers. I have ten spots for tomatoes, so they'll be filled by six of my home-grown Amish Paste tomatoes, and two home-grown Burbank Reds. I plan to purchase two Principe Borghese, but if I can't find any to buy, then I'll just put in the two extra Amish Paste that I grew and call it good. If all goes as I plan, however, I should be able to pass on the two extra Amish Paste tomatoes to a friend.

I'm just SO relieved that the leaves are greening up again! Honestly--it's like having sick children, sort of. The other night my girls and I went to see a movie called "The Future of Food," and at several points I was so horrified I just wanted to cry. The GM issue is even worse than I thought, and I already thought it was bad. Afterward, we discussed it and the kids agreed: the issue of the heirloom tomatoes and the other plants we're growing has gone from being just Mom's nostalgic hobbyist project to a moral, ethical and physical imperative. We have to change the way we think, the way we eat, and the way we think about what we eat. At this stage of the game, the issues of whether the apple tree waits to flower until after the last frost or whether the raised-from-seed heirloom tomato plants are nutrient deprived have taken center stage in our formerly fast-food, eat-on-the-go, rarely-cook-our-own dinner lives.