The instructions I left for Owen ran two pages, and one of them was a drawing. I sketched the porch in colored pencil, all 26 feet of it, and numbered every pot. The ones that needed water every day got a red circle, the every-other-day pots got blue, and the rosemary, which would honestly rather be ignored, got a small gray X. Thirteen years of making seating charts will do that to a person.
We spent August 9 to 16 in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, in a rented cottage we split with Nate's sister Erin, her husband Mike and their two girls, who are 8 and 12. Our share came to $1,450 for the week. It was the first full week we'd left home in the middle of August since I started growing tomatoes, and I was more nervous about the garden than about the Saturday traffic at the bridge.
Hiring a fourteen-year-old
Owen lives across the street. He's 14, polite, mows a couple of lawns on our block, and had never watered a tomato in his life. We offered $15 a day for porch watering morning and evening, a hose soak for the raised beds every other day, and feeding Pim twice a day. He took notes on his phone while I walked him through the routine, twice, which made me like him immediately.
The prep took most of Friday:
- I picked everything ripe or close to it, which filled the woven basket and most of a mixing bowl.
- I moved the herb pots off the hottest end of the bench and clustered them by the screen door, where the porch roof shades them by mid-afternoon.
- I gave both raised beds a long soak and topped up the shredded-leaf mulch.
- I left the galvanized can full by the spigot, the hose coiled where he'd find it, and a note saying any ripe Sungold was his to eat.
The week, from a distance
The Cape was everything it's supposed to be. The kids swam in the kettle ponds every afternoon, Mateo and his younger cousin spent a whole low tide building drip castles on the bay side, and Nate ate oysters with Mike while I pretended not to check my phone. Owen sent a photo of the porch every evening without being asked. On Wednesday a line of thunderstorms rolled through at home, and his text said "it rained a lot so I skipped the beds, is that ok." It was exactly right.
There was one wobble. On Thursday it hit the low 90s back home, and his evening photo showed the Black Cherry bucket at the sunny end of the porch lying flat as a dishrag. I asked him to give it a second can, he did, and by Friday morning it was standing up again. That bucket is the thirstiest thing we own, and I should have pulled it into the shade before we left.
What we came home to
We pulled in Saturday afternoon, sandy and sunburned, and I walked straight through the house to the backyard before carrying in a single bag. Everything was alive. The petunias in the rail boxes had gone leggy, the basil had bolted into white flower spikes, and two cucumbers on the chain-link had turned into something closer to baseball bats. The paste tomatoes, green and stubborn when we left, had decided this was their week. The San Marzanos were hanging in long red clusters, and the Cherokee Purple had split at the shoulders after the rain, those dusky purple-brown tops cracked open like old leather.
We picked a little over eight pounds of tomatoes that first evening, and the kitchen counter hasn't been clear since. Pim was sitting in the front window looking well fed and personally offended that we'd gone anywhere.
We paid Owen $105 for the seven days and added a $15 tip, so $120 in all, plus a quart bag of Sungolds that he claims his mother ate. Between the cottage and the watering, the week came to about $1,570, and the garden didn't lose a single plant. I'd hire him again tomorrow, with the same map and one new line on it, in red: move the Black Cherry before we leave.
