My annual tomato report

I’m surprised at how many readers have asked me about my tomatoes this year.

Actually, no one has asked me, and that doesn’t really surprise me. But I’ll tell you about them anyway.

My last three years haven’t gone well growing tomatoes. Two years ago I barely had enough for a BLT and last year I bought what I thought were Big Boy tomato plants and they turned out to have been mislabeled. They were cherry tomatoes — which I like, but it’s tough to cover a BLT with 20 of those little buggers.

This year I tried three Beefsteak tomato plants because their pictures looked like they could cover a BLT with ease.

After I planted them they took off real well, then just exploded in growth over the past couple weeks with all the rain we’ve had. Now they’re out of control.

They grew so big so fast that the cages I planted them in couldn’t contain the spreading vines. After the big green tomatoes started sprouting, the plants got so heavy they toppled over on to the ground, helped in their downfall by the heavy winds that have whipped through the region during recent wicked thunderstorms.

I couldn’t fit the branches back inside the tomato cages without breaking the vines. My only recourse to keeping the cages upright was to reinforce them with wood slats. I stopped by Marcus Lumber Saturday morning and picked up eight slats and drove them into the ground to keep the cages standing upright.

In hindsight, I probably should have used larger cages, but I’ve had these for years and they’ve served my previous anemic plants well.

You can’t beat fresh tomatoes, either to eat by themselves or on a BLT.

One item we can grow in abundance is rhubarb. We had a nice rhubarb patch on the south side of the house when we moved in 40 years ago, and those tart sticks are still growing strong. Mary harvests a bunch every spring for rhubarb pie, which we love, and encourages our neighbors to help themselves. My love of rhubarb goes back to my childhood on Geneseo Street when we’d head out to the patch in the back yard and dip raw rhubarb into a cup of sugar.

Although my hopes are high for a good tomato crop in the next few weeks, I’m open to donations from readers who want to curry favor with the local newspaper. Our ethical guidelines about taking gifts are suspended when it comes to homegrown tomatoes.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.