I stepped outside a couple of days ago, and the cooler weather felt like an assault against my skin. The Georgia heat has finally officially calmed down, and not one to follow any rules on the calendar, summer has officially declared herself finished, until next year.
"Have you looked at the forecast for next week?" my dad asked me yesterday while we were sitting outside. "Lows in the 20s."
"Ugh. I guess my tomatoes and peppers are done for the year," I replied. I didn't get to do as much gardening as I'd hoped this year for various reasons, but I've got some cherry tomato and bell pepper plants still thriving. They stand taller than I am, and each one is still filled with fruit and lush with green leaves. They're lucky they're right next to my duck pen because we barely got any rain in September and October, and they only survived because, as you might imagine, the pen is a hotspot for water activity.
My Yankee friends are always shocked when they hear about me growing tomatoes in November. One year, we were still picking them around Christmas. But that's the thing about tomato season in the South. First frost, last frost, whatever — our gardens couldn't care less about historical data and weather forecasts. I know people in Georgia who put their tomatoes in the ground in February and March and take the risk. Georgia weather is as fickle as the humans who live here. We might be swimming in our pools and lakes in February or we might get four inches of snow that shut down the whole state in March. It's a gamble.
Then there are those, like my grandfather, who swear by doing it on a sacred day like Good Friday, Tax Day, Easter, or Mother's Day. Some go by the book and wait until May when there's absolutely no chance of frost, but no matter when we started, our plants often last through the fall. Some people even rip the old ones up and start a new round in July or August.
The Old Farmer's Almanac says that the average tomato plant takes 60 to 100 days to grow, and I can't imagine ever living anywhere that even cuts that close. Even if all of those extra days we get down here make us a little... dramatic.
We have a tendency toward drama down here anyway — cousin Shirley wears the wrong thing to church, the AC goes out in late July, or someone tries to serve us soggy fried chicken and, well, bless their hearts. But trying to keep those tomatoes alive through three calendar seasons is unlike anything you've ever witnessed. We're dragging hoses across the yard, cursing squirrels that get too curious, closely guarding our great-great grandfather's secret remedy for blight, and running around in the dark throwing sheets and blankets over our plants on those rare 30-degree nights like we're tucking in our children. Don't even get me started on the hornworms, or, as I call them, chicken treats.
But, as it turns out, tomatoes have always been a little dramatic.
Tomatoes were first grown in South America, where Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador sit today, and eaten by the Aztecs, but they eventually made their way back to Europe as things did. According to Smithsonian magazine, "Garden historian Elisabeth Whittle wrote in 2016 that, in the 1540s and 1550s, the tomato was grown in Europe 'mainly as an exotic curiosity and only by a few people.'"
The first know European reference to a tomato was most likely by Italian herbalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, who wrote in 1544 that tomatoes were both poisonous and aphrodisiacs. They could either kill you or make for a very good time. The poisonous part seemed to stick, at least in Western Europe, and for a couple of hundred of years, people in Britain and the North American colonies largely refused to eat them.
By the 1700s, many Europeans feared the tomato. According to one theory, the 'golden apple' became the 'poison apple' because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them — but wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the fruit would leach lead from the plate, which was said to result in illness from lead poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time; the tomato was picked as the culprit.
Smithsonian says that by the mid 1700s, people in the Carolinas were growing and eating tomatoes reluctantly or treating them as ornamental plants, but they weren't sure how to cook them, though in the early 1820s, recipes began to appear in periodicals. In the 1830s, a "very large thick-bodied green worm, with oblique white streaks along its sides and a curved thorn-like horn at the end of its back" began appearing on tomato crops, which sent another wave of panic through the colonies. Many believed that the worm was poisonous and merely touching something that it touched would kill you. These days, we know that's not true. The hornworm is just an big, ugly, obnoxious pest that can decapitate a single tomato plant in one night.
Legend has it that what sparked the change in attitude toward the tomato was a man named Col. Robert Gibbon Johnson, an eccentric horticulturalist from New England, who announced he was going to eat one of the red fruits on the courthouse steps in Salem, N.J., on the morning of June 28, 1820. According to an article published by the University of Missouri, even his own doctor said he was stupid. "The foolish colonial will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. Should he by some unlikely chance survive his skin will stick to his stomach and cause cancer."
The story goes that hundreds gathered, prepared to watch this man wither and die before their very eyes, but Johnson was confident. He even hired a band for the occasion, and some say he didn't eat just one tomato but an entire basket. The crowd was in for a shock when he escaped the courthouse steps unscathed.
Today, the tomato is a food staple in the United States and around the world. About 85% of American home gardeners grow them, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests that the average person eats about 31 pounds of tomatoes each year if you include sauces, pizzas, ketchup, etc.
That said, I have a confession to make. Despite the fact that I grew 47 tomato plants this year, I don't eat tomatoes at all. I do eat ketchup, salsa, and pizza and pasta sauces, even pico de gallo, but you'll never see me eat a raw tomato on its own. I'll pick them off a salad or burger so fast you won't even notice. What can I say? I told you Southerners were dramatic.
