3/21/2010

"Homegrown tomatoes homegrown tomatoes

What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes

Only two things that money can't buy

That's true love and homegrown tomatoes."

-- Guy Clark

Local eateries agree with songwriter Clark's observation, at least the part involving the value of tomatoes. Journal reporter Chris Hunter last week interviewed local restaurateurs who are bemoaning tomato prices in the wake of devastating freezes in Florida that sucked the sauce right out of the fresh tomato market.

Temperatures in December and January throughout the Sunshine State did not favor tomato cultivation.

Anyone who has tried to grow tomatoes in a backyard garden knows that tomatoes hate cold weather as much as New York retirees, which is why both groups end up in Florida. In fact, if tomato plants were ambulatory, they'd organize afternoon games of bocce ball.

Tomatoes won't germinate, grow or bear fruit in cold weather. No amount of sun, enriched soil, water, tender loving care or uplifted prayers will coax a tomato plant to deliver the goods if the temperature stays below, say, 50 degrees. Threaten a plant with a hard freeze and it will succumb within hours, although quick-on-their-feet gardeners can pluck green fruit from the dying vines in hope that some will ripen indoors.

This was not an option for commercial growers in Florida, who cultivate more than 40,000 acres of love apples, according to the University of Florida. With almost 5,000 plants an acre, and each acre yielding about 36,000 pounds of tomatoes, that would be a lot of plucking. And think of the size of the windowsill required to ripen them all.

Few people would buy green tomatoes, but the red tomato market is something else entirely.

Here are some facts from the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange:

n Florida ranks first in the nation in value of production of fresh tomatoes.

n Florida ships more than 1.1 billion pounds of fresh tomatoes to the United States, Canada and abroad.

n Total tomato crop value at the farm level exceeds $619 million.

It's easy to see now why a nasty chill can put the squeeze on the country's tomato crop. A few folks who profess to have human DNA say they don't care for tomatoes in any form -- raw, cooked, chunked, pureed, sauced, sliced or sugared. These pitiful individuals would rather eat rancid roadkill, so for them, Florida could freeze solid, calf off from the rest of the continent like an iceberg and bob around the Caribbean, and their diet would be unaffected.

For us tomato lovers, though, a Florida freeze is terrible news, particularly because it is about this time of year, not having tasted a home-grown tomato for months, that we start to get the shakes, even for a shipped-in Styrofoam-textured industrial knockoff.

Fresh homegrown tomatoes is what makes hot, buggy summers tolerable.

Guy Clark had us pegged when he penned his whimsical lyrics:

"When I die don't bury me

In a box in a cemetery

Out in the garden would be much better

I could be pushin' up homegrown tomatoes."

nGordon D. Fiedler Jr. can be reached at 822-1407 or by e-mail at gfiedler@salina.com.

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