The Biggest, Greenest Tomatoes
“My daughter and I started a garden in our backyard this year. It’s been a great bonding experience; it’s encouraged her to try foods she normally wouldn’t since she helped grow them, and it’s taught her where food really comes from (that is, not a plastic bag in the grocery store).
“However, as gardening newbies, we really don’t know what we’re doing. Case in point: a vine started growing in our garden, and it got bigger by the day. I vaguely remembered planting tomato seeds, so we constructed a makeshift trellis for the vines to climb on. Every day, they continued to grow and flower, but we never got our tomatoes.
“Finally we got our first fruit, but it looked more like a cucumber. Puzzled, I headed to the Internet to do some research. Turned out these weren’t cucumbers (and certainly not tomatoes), but baby watermelons! This puzzled me even more, since we’d never planted watermelon seeds.
“Then I remembered: one summer day after eating an organic watermelon, my daughter and I had a watermelon seed spitting contest in our backyard. Some of these seeds must have landed in our garden patch and, without realizing it, we became watermelon farmers. It just shows that life has a power all its own — and though we try to tame it for our own needs, we’re always at its mercy… and reaping its blessings.”
