The first fruits for this seaon's trials are ripe! Time to think about filing reports, so future growers can know what tastes and grows good! Gang members who need report forms will find them at the ITG Potting Shed.

Texas 'Maters

In general, beefsteaks fare poorly in hot climates. At first glance, this seems contradictory: a long growing season would argue for late-maturing big beefsteaks like Park's OG Whopper, Dinnerplate, Old Wyandotte. But heat is the enemy of these giants. Experienced gardeners in USDA zones 8-11 often think small: Yellow Pear Cherry, an heirloom that's been around for at least 100 years being a favorite. Heavy production. Mild, sweet taste. Resistant to alternaria stem canker disease. Widely adapted.

Fredericksburg, Texas, July 31, 1999--The pit was hot, the sky blue and cloudless, the longnecks cold and sweating. Tomatoes were everywhere. Tossed into baskets. Sliced thick on big white paper plates. Stacked into antique market garden lugs. Perched on narrow porch railings and makeshift tabletops like some fairytale giant's marbles: bi-colored glass cat-eyes and shooters made of tumbled rose quartz, Red River jasper, tusk ivory, and blood-red carnelian. Treasures of summer. Magical in their associations.

By Noon, Internet Tomato Gang members from as far away as New Mexico had begun gathering in the yard of the mid-19th century one-room Cherry Mountain schoolhouse. As they arrived and greeted one another, they scrambled for the shade of clustered Escarpment Oak and big, heavy-limbed Pecan trees, willing themselves to ignore the record-breaking heat--100 degrees Fahrenheit by one o'clock. Hunkered down like a small herd of white tail, they grazed on peanuts, Chex Mix, and tidily cut pieces of raw vegetables. They chatted among themselves, tending to each other's company but still careful to keep an eye turned towards the pit master and his twin helpers who were ministering to the brisket, ribs, and whole chickens that had been cooking over a bed of hard, hand-cut Mesquite since five o'clock that morning.

It was not a short wait. Barbeque is taken seriously in Texas and cannot be rushed. In this, it is like the tomato: the anticipation, the waiting is as much of the ritual and pleasure as is the eating. The gardeners among the guests understood. And in due time, everyone made his or her way to the New School, a fine limestone building with square corners, a standing seam tin roof, fifteen-foot tall ceilings, and floors made of wide planks of hand-sawed Pecan.

The children of Gillespie County have long abandoned both the Old and the New Schools. They prefer to board buses for an hour's commute to learn their lessons in modern cinder block academic complexes that are serviced by the Dairy Queen and surrounded by automotive parts stores. Today the Old School is a private museum, and the New School serves as a clubhouse for the ranchers and farmers who still live in Cherry Mountain. The rest of the time the schools are silent, tended by black-faced sheep and the occasional curious Hereford. Both keep the grass in the schoolyard trimmed while itinerant Nubian and Boer goats make certain the Cypress and Oaks are limbed-up and pruned.

But this day, the schoolhouses of Cherry Mountain were wide open, filled with conversation, laughter, good will and the pride of hosting the Texas contingent of the Internet Tomato Gang. The members' ages ranged from twelve months to nearly ninety years. Each had brought a covered dish for supper along with his tomatoes for show-and-tell and bragging rights.

Each also brought an appetite. When the dinner bell finally rang, everyone filed into the New School and quickly settled into folding chairs at long tables covered with cloths made of tomato print fabric. For the next hour heads were mostly bowed, the guests focused on making their way through platters heaped with dry-rub, pit-cooked and smoky barbeque, tureens and deep pots of fresh-cooked pinto beans with chunks of Jalapeno and Serrano peppers for seasoning, side dishes of sliced 1015 sweet onions, over-sized mixing bowls of homemade coleslaw, gallons of strong, bitter and heavily iced unsweet tea. Pies made in someone's kitchen, not brought off the shelf. Cakes made with White Lily flour, butter and cream and care. And yes, there were more homegrown tomatoes.

It was a feast, this celebration of mid-Summer. Of tomatoes. Of gardeners. Of human connections initiated on machines, directed by digital handshaking between computer hosts, and modulated by the constant hiss of binary data coursing through miles and miles of telephone lines to bring them here. To a one-room Texas school house. To a tasting of tomatoes grown and tended in gardens that are both ephemeral and firmly anchored in the soil.

With temperatures topping out at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the tomatoes were definitely "warm from the vine"! ITG members somehow managed to look cool as they checked out what everybody else had grown. The tasters favorite? Amber-Colored, an Open Pollinated Determinate variety from the former Soviet Union. Sweet/tart. Early. 2-3 ounces.			Aunt Ginny's Purple, Red Pear, Black from Tula, Evergreen, Prometheus, Goodness of Gladden, Taurus, Matt's Wild Cherry, Spoon, Old Brooks, Lee, Jeff Davis, Abe Lincoln, Ruby Cluster, Dona, Banana Legs, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, Sweetie, Juliet, Kentucky Plate, Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Black Brandywine, Southern Nights, Druzba, Immune	"Nobody loves me like my old tomato can" -- hit tune in the 1920s
		I want 'em all!
	Beefsteaks, Cherries, Paste, Processing, Salad, Slicers, Saladette, Plums, Currant.			Open Pollinated: A tomato that's naturally self-pollinating and whose seed reproduces a plant true to the characteristics of its parent. --Darrell Merrell "The Tomato Man"
Vote Now!!		What's your favorite heirloom, hybrid, or O.P. tomato?

Texas 'Maters is adapted from a book about tomatoes and the people who grow them scheduled for publication by Chelsea Green Publishing in the Fall of 2000. Copyright © 1999 by Catharine Vinson. All rights reserved. Except for private use it may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission.