We pulled into the driveway at about six on Monday, and before the car was unpacked I could smell the tomatoes. That warm, green, slightly sharp smell from the vines, plus something sweeter that turned out to be a dozen Sungolds split open on the porch floor.
We'd been gone four days. The cabin near Lake George was $780 for three nights, Friday through Sunday, and my summer camp stipend covered it with room to spare. It was the first trip we've taken where I didn't leave anyone a two-page watering sheet. Owen, the teenager across the street, now 15, watered the porch pots once a day for $60, and the drip timer took care of the raised beds. I came home to a garden that was perfectly fine and had clearly not waited for us.
The lake
The cabin was small and a little musty, with a screened porch of its own that I spent too long admiring. The lake was cold enough to make Mateo yell every single time he jumped off the dock, which was often. Nate grilled every night. We hiked a short trail on Saturday, ate too much ice cream on Sunday, and in the evenings the water went from slate blue to the soft gray of a pencil drawing while the hills turned black behind it.
I'll admit I checked the weather back home twice a day. There was a thunderstorm on Saturday night, and I lay awake thinking about Sungolds. Owen texted a photo every evening: the porch pots, the watering can, a thumbs-up. On Sunday the photo had a Sungold in his hand, which I decided to count as part of his pay.
Forty pounds on the counter
Tuesday morning I picked everything with color, and the woven harvest basket went back and forth to the kitchen scale six times. The total was a little over 40 pounds, from six plants in the west bed and four buckets on the porch. It's the most we've ever picked at once.
The paste tomatoes, two San Marzanos and the Amish Paste, had ripened in a single wave. The Cherokee Purple had a dozen fruits with those dark, dusky shoulders, two of them cracked around the stem after the storm. The Early Girl kept up her steady, unexciting pace. On the porch, Juliet held every ripe fruit on the vine, just as she did last year, while Sungold and Matt's Wild Cherry had dropped plenty on the floor. Some of those went to the chipmunks. Some were past even the chipmunks.
My mistake was obvious in hindsight. The night before we left, I picked only what was fully ripe, because I wanted the rest to finish on the vine. If I'd picked everything with a blush and let it ripen on the counter, we'd have lost almost nothing to splitting and dropping. Next trip, I strip the vines of color the night before.
Triage
A counter covered in tomatoes needs a system, or it becomes a counter covered in fruit flies. Here's how I sorted them:
- Cracked or soft: straight into the oven for roasted sauce, the same day. Three sheet pans.
- Paste tomatoes: held for canning salsa a week from Saturday, stem side down on a towel, out of the sun.
- The prettiest slicers: sandwiches, plus a bag each for Sal and Joanne next door and one for Owen, on top of his $60.
- Cherries: bowls on the table, for anyone walking by.
Nothing goes in the fridge. Cold kills the flavor, and the counter is warm enough to finish the ones that came in pale.
Into the notebook it all went, by variety, the way I log every harvest. At the supermarket prices I use to value the garden, that one morning's pick came to well over a hundred dollars. Not quite the cabin, but not nothing, and none of it came in a plastic clamshell.
Five days later, the counter still looks like a farm stand, mostly because the vines have kept going. Three more sheet pans of sauce are in the freezer, Mateo has eaten a tomato sandwich every day for lunch, and the canner is coming up from the basement next Saturday. He has asked to be in charge of the cilantro.
