No, this is not the world’s largest heirloom tomato salad (although, come to think of it, I ought to call up the folks at Guinness...the world record people, not the brewers...and find out where the record stands). These are the love apples that got knocked around in life. Maybe they got split in a thunderstorm, maybe they had a few bites taken out of them by groundhogs or mice or tomato hornworms. Maybe they got gouged by the woody stems of other tomatoes. If they chance to make it to market, my customers refer to them as seconds, oozers, softees, ghetto tomatoes, tomato water tomatoes. The sight of them assembled together like this will no doubt move many a chef to dream about the gallons and gallons of tomato water to be extracted therefrom. Alas! These here love apples arrived in my packing shed with absolutely no shelf life in their veins although my mother, like some depression era vigilante, is famous for showing up at five o’clock the night before market as me and the crew are hurriedly packing and praying we’ll have the truck loaded by dark.
“Such beautiful tomatoes,” mom will cry out. “How could you throw them out like this?” ”They’re oozers,” I’ll protest as she recovers a few flats of them. ”I can’t stand to see this. Such waste.” ”Mom, they’ll stink up the truck. They’ll ooze all over the good tomatoes. If you want to take them and make sauce with them, go ahead, but I’m not taking them to market.” So back they go to mom’s kitchen, a tiny fraction of my invalids, where they get slathered liberally over sandwiches or made into sauce. The rest of the left behinders make up the better portion of my early autumn compost pile. The bouncing on the way to market always softens up a fresh batch of tomato water tomatoes from the love apples that looked good before the trip.
I have no doubt that the poor innocent earthworms will all have chancre sores on their mouths till they’re through breaking down these tomatoes into black, sweet smelling, friable loam. And I think I can safely boast that I have the most beautiful compost pile in Berks Count, Pennsylvania this time of year.
Leave it to an Irish farmer to take to boasting about his compost heap. With the killer frost rearing up its head to strike, all the tomatoes are on the last leg of this year’s journey. On second thought, maybe its time to call on Guinness, the brewers.
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