Eighty-Three Tomato Plants

A typical every-other-day harvest from my gardenThe other day I was chatting with Lois, the retiree who has been volunteering at the reception desk in our lobby. Lois cracks me up. I can't even begin to reproduce our conversation here, so let me just sum it up by saying that she's a dramatic, poetry-reciting, intuitive, twinkle-in-the-eye storyteller. At one point in our conversation, she suddenly popped out with: "I have 83 tomato plants in my garden this year."

"You WHAT???" I exclaimed. "Eighty-three? How on earth do you manage that? I have only eight, and I can't give them away fast enough."

"Well," she explained. "You know Wal-mart sells seeds. When they get their first seed packs in, they go for a dime a pack. I always watch for those first seeds. If you wait, you'll have to buy the little starts later for $2.99 a piece ... or even more. So I got a packet of tomato seeds and threw them out in a garden patch to sprout. And when they came up, there were eighty-three."

I laughed. "And then you couldn't bear to abort them," I said.

"That's right," she said. "I've been harvesting tomatoes and canning them."

Ick, I thought. I hate canned vegetables. Serve them fresh or freeze them, or even dry them and I'm okay. But I want to chew my food, and canning makes that less likely.

Since then I've been mulling over the implications of growing eighty-three tomato plants in one's garden.

And I've been thinking about whether there are spiritual lessons to be harvested from Lois's garden.

I'll be watching for that ten-cent Wal-mart seed sale next spring.