You Bet Your Tomatoes
By Mike McGrath
Anyway, there are lots of neat actual reasons why you should grow your own tomatoes. Here are just a few:
- All of the tomatoes for sale in grocery stores are now genetically engineered with most varieties containing DNA taken from Regis Philbin, Alex Trebek, Wink Martindale, Whoopi Goldberg, Pat Sajak, or some other game-show type when they weren't paying attention.
- You can't quite afford a boat but still have a desperate need to show your neighbors that you know how to foolishly waste your time and money in a really pointless manner.
- They're easier to grow than watermelons . . .
- . . . and it's LOTS easier to tell when they're ripe.
- Most other summertime endeavors have a much higher risk of death and/or dismemberment.
- You'll have a handy excuse for avoiding those treacherous family reunion picnics, mosquito- and blackfly-infested hikes, frolics in freezing cold ocean waves, and other festive seasonal outings you'd be dragged to if you couldn't say, "Gee, I'd love to, but I performed a special Obiodynamic copper flange pruning technique' on my tomato plants last night, and I have to stay here and spray them with compost tea every hour until Tuesday or the pistils won't be firm."
- You'll be able to throw around gardening terms like "pistil" and "compost tea" without being laughed at. Maybe.
- There's probably something even more tedious that you'd have to do inside the house if you didn't have the tomatoes to herd.
- You'll have a great reason (OK, "excuse," but it's your word against theirs) to buy, rent, or borrow a big tiller and thus use a really noisy, dangerous piece of gasoline-powered equipment!
- You can wait until those annoying neighbors (oh, come on, you know who I mean) have company over in their oh-so-perfect backyard to fire up that really noisy piece of power equipment.
- You'll be able to cut the family food bill by a good $30 or $40 a year in tomatoes!
- When your kids complain that they're bored for the 368th time that summer (and school's only been out for a month), you can say, "Well you could always weed the tomatoes."
- You can say it A LOT.
