Tomatoes!

I bought tomato transplants on Wednesday. It was very exciting.
Many people wax rhapsodic when comes to fresh garden tomatoes. A song by Guy Clark comes to mind. I am not one of those people. I like them, but my palate is not refined enough to tell a huge difference between fresh and store bought tomatoes for the most part. Maybe store tomato quality is increasing, or all the home grown nightshades I've had were poorly grown, I've just never been blown away by taste differences.
So why, if I'm underwhelmed by tomatoes, was Wednesday's purchase exciting? First, every novice gardener starts with tomatoes; so tomato transplants look, smell and feel like gardening to me. They scream spring time and sunshine from their black plastic containers. Second, this is the year that I grow a tomato that I will have no choice but to write a song about. This year I will no longer be blase' about my fruit. I am growing different varieties than ever before and I'm a more dedicated gardener than ever before.
I was planning on going to a community garden sale this morning. The sale is famous for it's tomato varieties and I was prepared to go and procure only the very best and sexiest heirloom tomatoes for my garden. Then Celelia Nasti, via her weekly radio spot on KUT's Folk Ways called "Growing Concerns", announced that while the sale is great, it is over crowded and you needed to get there at 5 am to stand in line or be relegated to buying spindly left over crap once all the really good gardeners have picked the place over. The sale is for a good cause and there are worse groups of people to stand in line with than gardeners, but her description of the event was enough to put me off. Which was probably her plan, saving all the good stuff for her and her bourgeois radio gardening cronies. I wouldn't put that past someone with a last name like Nasti.
Her plan worked and I bought garden center tomatoes. We went to The Great Outdoors on South Congress in Austin. For those not familiar with Austin, South Congress is the main road in the zip code (triumphant trumpet music, please!) 78704, the epicenter of all things hip and ironic. How could I go wrong with ironic tomatoes. The Great Outdoors is a very nice garden center with a coffee shop and one of the mangers there is also a a nondenominational pastor of some sort who once officiated a wedding I attended. 78704 indeed. They had a phenomenal tomato selection, including several of the heirloom varieties that I had researched to buy at the community garden sale. Take that Cecelia.
I bought the common hybrids - Better Bush, Early Girl and Bush Celebrity
and the heirlooms - Porter, Brandywine Black, Striped German and Matt's Wild Cherry (how am I supposed to resist that?)
It is too early to put tomatoes in the ground in Dripping Springs. The chance of freeze is still too high for a week to 10 days or so. I could plant them if I had a way to protect them, but I don't. So I put my transplants in pots on the back porch for couple of weeks. My plan is that I planted them deeper in the pots and they can grow new roots, then I'll plant them deeper in the garden beds for even more roots. For those reading this blog to pick up gardening tips (a bad idea), tomatoes are the only plant I know of that responds to be planted too deeply by growing new roots, everything else dies. Also, while in pots than can get used to cooler night time temperatures without the danger of a freeze - I'll just pull them all in if it looks too close to 32.
A brief word about Texas weather. Please note on Sunday one week it was too sunny and nice to post much and on Tuesday the same week, it snowed. I find that interesting and could bang on and on about it, but I know every region of the world is fascinated with it's own weather pattern and the rest of the world could give a damn, so I'll spare us all.