Farmer H Needs A Tomato Refresher Course

Farmer H has been receiving tomatoes from his buddies who have gardens. He brings them home in a plastic bag from the Devil's Playground. You would think that somewhere during his many years in The Universe, Farmer H would have accrued some information about home-grown tomatoes. Then again, he must have been snoozing on the day it was revealed that goats are herd animals...

Garden tomatoes are more fragile than the hard-as-a-baseball store tomatoes. Flopping them around in a plastic bag does them no favors. So far, they have survived the rough treatment.

Saturday morning, Farmer H came out of the bedroom and went directly to the front door. That's unusual. His first stop is usually the back door in the laundry room, when he gives water to the dogs. Then he comes to sit on the long couch to wait and "secretly" listen in on my phone conversation with The Pony.

"Where are you going?"

"To the truck. I forgot, I had some tomatoes to bring in."

"So they sat in a bag in your truck all day, in THIS HEAT?"

"They weren't hot. They were in the truck!"

I heard Farmer H rustling the plastic bag as he set out the tomatoes. He inconveniently puts them on a sturdy paper plate. The one resting atop the stack of sturdy paper plates that Farmer H uses each night to eat his supper. So if I set out a plate for him, I have to first lift off the plate of garden tomatoes. Heh, heh! Starting last night, I told Farmer H he needed to get his own plate. To which he replied, "Huh."

Anyhoo... after Farmer H left for a day of selling at his SUS2 (Storage Unit Store 2), I went to the kitchen to get my banana. The bananas are in a large fruit bowl sitting behind the stack of sturdy paper plates.

There were two large tomatoes in this batch. I picked up a little one, looking like a Roma tomato, to set aside for my supper salad, and it SLIMED ME! What in the Not-Heaven? It looked perfectly fine. I looked at the plate. It was wet. I picked up the biggest tomato. It had apparently sprung a leak. No visible hole in it, but it was seeping from the bottom, where there were some creases in its skin. 

No way was I going to harbor a leaky tomato in MY Mansion! Once upon a time, when I rented a ramshackle house in Cuba, MO, my grandma had sent me a box of tomatoes when my mom and dad came for a visit. They were in a box like a flat of strawberries would come in. A waxy kind of brown cardboard with low sides. I set it on the floor by the cabinets, since I didn't have much counter room. Mmm... those fresh tomatoes were SO GOOD. I ate a couple every night. 

The following weekend, I left on Saturday morning to go to Springfield and visit a friend. Upon returning Sunday afternoon, a terrible smell hit me as I walked in! One of those tomatoes had gone bad, and most of its fluid had seeped out into that cardboard box. Thank the Gummi Mary, the cardboard was waxy, or that liquid would have soaked into the carpet of the kitchen floor. Yes. Somebody had actually carpeted a kitchen floor!

Anyhoo... I have since grown cautious about inspecting tomatoes daily, to make sure they're not leaking. In this case, I checked the other tomatoes, and the next-biggest had a bruisy dark mushy spot. Out it went with the leaker, off the back porch, good riddance!

I'm sure Farmer H thinks the day closed up in a plastic bag in his truck did not affect those home-grown tomatoes. I'm pretty sure it did.