The $64 Tomato Read online

  Praise for The $64 Tomato

  “Engaging, well paced and informative.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A wry memoir in which every reader who’s spent more to grow a plant than he could purchase it for at the super market will recognize his own successes, failures and foibles.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for anyone who has ever looked at a tomato and thought, I could grow that!”

  —Life magazine

  “A genuinely humorous book that debunks the American dream not in the familiar economic sense but in its rural incarnation. It is a paean to the homesteader who never gets written about, the pioneer whom all of us could have been in another life.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Money, sex, and aging. That’s real gardening!”

  —The New York Observer

  “Engaging, funny, and down-to-earth.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “William Alexander transcends the inevitable failures with bushel baskets of self-deprecating wit. As a bonus, bits of practical information are scattered as freely as seeds among the hilarious anecdotes.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “You don’t have to be a gardener to enjoy and learn from William Alexander’s derring-do. You don’t have to know a shuffle hoe from a reel mower to laugh out loud.”

  —The State (SC)

  “A quick read full of fun and foibles. And because the adversaries are worthy opponents, combat is fair.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A rollicking read.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Reminiscent of the movie comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House…. Enjoyable, thought-provoking.”

  —The National Gardener

  “Often hilarious…. Will strike a universal chord.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A witty memoir proving that Mother Earth can’t be controlled, especially when beetles, worms and grubs come out to play.”

  —The Economist

  “Readers who have decided to try ‘growing a vegetable or two’ will, instead, laugh uproariously at author William Alexander’s tales of squirrel armies, organic growing and a woodchuck that would make Dr. Frankenstein proud.”

  —The Louisville Courier-Journal

  “Recounts with wry humor and dead-on insights [Alexan der’s] joys, woes, epiphanies, and philosophies…. [This] book will strike a chord (and hit a few nerves) with anyone who dreams of orderly rows of ripening veggies and eating a tomato fresh off the vine.”

  —Garden Design magazine

  “[A] hilarious horticultural memoir…. Even if you never plant a seed in your life, The $64 Tomato will give you a healthy appreciation of the fact that we will never be able to completely control Mother Earth.”

  —The St. Petersburg Times

  “Alexander’s account is a delightful guide to achieving gardening bliss…. Humor, it turns out, is essential, and Alexander has a large store of it; it infuses his story from start to finish.”

  —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “The subtitle applies to just about everybody who ever stuck a spade into soil. So what makes Alexander different? He can write about his mistakes and successes—and there are plenty of both—in a funny, self-deprecating way.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “For a breezy summer read or a break from trying to get in those peppers after all the rain we’ve had, The $64 Tomato will leave you laughing and understanding why Adam and Eve might think Eden wasn’t such a great place after all.”

  —The Rutland (VT) Herald

  “An amusing romp through one man’s innocent little dream.”

  —CS (Chicago)

  “[Alexander] admits to his madness with a wry and rueful sense of humor … [and] treats us to an often rib-tickling tale of his misadventures.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “This enjoyable book, laced with humor and Alexander’s garden philosophy, is highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Quick and very entertaining…. Alexander is Icarus; his garden is the sun. Where these two meet makes The $64 Tomato very endearing.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[A] hilarious horticultural memoir…. Alexander’s slightly poisoned paradise manages to impart an existential lesson on the interconnectedness of nature and the fine line between nurturing and killing.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “An amusing compilation of do’s and don’ts for aspiring gardeners afflicted with hubris.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “I thoroughly enjoyed every word of The $64 Tomato and was literally unable to put the book down…. I give The $64 Tomato five out of five sunflowers.”

  —Bella Online

  “A delicious ride through one man’s seriocomic horticultural adventure.”

  —Book Page

  “William Alexander’s intelligent and funny memoir is a tribute to humankind’s irrepressible urge to cultivate the earth. His warmhearted take on the domestic scene reminds us all that life began in a garden.”

  —Katherine Whiteside,

  author of Antique Flowers and Classic Bulbs

  “William Alexander’s engaging book, The $64 Tomato, shows just to what great lengths a man will go to have the garden of his dreams. For those of us who love to grow things, nothing Alexander does, no matter how ridiculous, costly, or time-consuming, seems out of the question. It all seems perfectly sane, and somehow reassuring.”

  —Richard Goodman, author of French Dirt

  THE $64 TOMATO

  William Alexander

  Author’s Note:

  While the people and events described in the following pages are real, some names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPELHILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2006 by William Alexander.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, March 2007.

  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2006.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Lines from Robert Creeley’s “The Door” from Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, reprinted by permission. Copyright © 1983 The Regents of the University of California.

  A portion of “Electronic Singing Fish Drives Deer from Garden” excerpted from “Hints from Heloise.” Copyright © 2001 by King Features Syndicate. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Alexander, William, 1953–

  The $64 tomato / William Alexander.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-503-2 (HC)

  1. Vegetable gardening—Hudson River Valley Region (N.Y. and N.J.)—Anecdotes. 2. Gardeners—Hudson River Valley Region (N.Y. and N.J.)—Anecdotes. 3. Alexander, William, 1953–

  I. Title: Sixty-four dollar tomato. II. Title.

  SB320.7.N7A44 2006

  635.09747’3—dc22 2005053790

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-557-5 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  For Anne, Zach, and Katie

  And to the memory of my father, William Alexander

  I will go to the garden.

 
I will be a romantic. I will sell

  myself in hell,

  in heaven also I will be.

  —Robert Creeley, “The Door”

  There’s a fine line between gardening and madness.

  —Cliff Clavin in Cheers

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Gentleman Farmer

  Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden

  We Know Where You Live

  One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad

  No Such Thing as Organic Apples

  You May Be Smarter, But He’s Got More Time

  Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire)

  Shell-Shocked: A Return to the Front (Burner)

  Christopher Walken, Gardener

  Cereal Killer

  Statuary Rape

  Harvest Jam

  The Existentialist in the Garden

  The $64 Tomato

  Childbirth. Da Vinci. Potatoes.

  Acknowledgments

  Suggested Reading

  Recipes

  PROLOGUE

  Gentleman Farmer

  “Why can’t Dad be more like other dads?” Katie asked my wife recently. “All my friends’ dads spend Sundays watching football and drinking beer.” Then for good measure she added, “I wish we had a normal family.”

  I was flabbergasted when I heard this. This is a thirteen-year-old’s ideal of a father? Belching beer in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon? I realize that most teenage girls think their families are weird (and their friends’ families cool), but still I was a little hurt. While this conversation was taking place, I was in the garden, of course, even though it was December. The first hard freeze of the season was coming in overnight, and I needed to harvest the remaining leeks. Later, while the Jets were blowing a close one, I was in the kitchen, making steaming leek-potato soup that Katie positively swooned over at dinner. And she wanted to trade me in for a beer-drinking couch potato?

  Granted, I have my obsessions and eccentricities, the garden being the most obvious, and maybe I’m not a typical dad, but I’m certainly normal. I decided to visit Zach’s bedroom for a reality check from a levelheaded seventeen-year-old.

  “Zach, you’d say I’m a normal dad and we’re a normal family, wouldn’t you?”

  “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha …” He nearly fell out of his chair, where he might have vanished for days beneath a deep pile of unwashed laundry, sweatshirts, textbooks, magazines, a trombone and a euphonium, and two guitars.

  “I’ll take that as a no?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Zach said, turning to face me directly. Zach has mastered the teenage art of subtly turning the tables on parent-child roles and making me feel the child, sheepish and a little embarrassed as he assumes the role of wise parent. “Nothing is normal about this family,” he lectured, not smiling.

  I’ve long known that I’m a little short on self-awareness, but this gap between my very own kids’ perception of our family life and mine was shocking nonetheless.

  “In what ways, Zach? It feels pretty normal to me.”

  “Dad, just look around,” Zach said, becoming exasperated with my denseness. “Take this house, for one. And you just came in from the garden. In freakin’ December.”

  “How was that leek soup tonight?”

  “And you cook.”

  “It was good, wasn’t it? I think the leeks are sweeter late in the year.”

  Zach spun his chair back to his computer, sighing and shaking his head. “December,” I heard him mutter under his breath.

  Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden

  Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

  —Katharine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen

  Bridget arrived for her interview late, breathless, and blond. As we drank herbal tea around the kitchen table, she dug deep into a leather portfolio, emerging with glossy photographs of gardens she had designed for previous clients. Anne ooh-aahed over the photographs, which looked like rather ordinary gardens to me, but to be fair, I was only seeing them peripherally. My eyes were riveted on the hands holding the photographs. Delicate, lightly freckled hands with dirty—filthy—fingernails. Real gardener’s fingernails. The effect was startling, at once repulsive and erotic. The phrase whore in the bedroom, horticulturist in the garden popped into my head. I tried to blink it away. When I finally looked up, Bridget smiled and squinted her crinkly green eyes at me. A winkless wink. Had I been caught ogling her dirty hands?

  After reviewing her credentials and our project, we strolled through the property, Bridget and I falling into lockstep as Anne trailed slightly behind. Passing various anonymous plants and flowers, Bridget would point to what was to me some nameless weedy shrub and exclaim in a breathless whisper something like, “Ah, a beautiful Maximus clitoris.” She knew all the botanical names, the Latin rolling off her tongue like steamy profanity in the heat of passion.

  We hired Bridget on the spot, without interviewing anyone else. It seems she’d made an impression on Anne as well.

  “Did you notice her beautiful teeth?” Anne sighed as Bridget drove off in her battered Toyota, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and noise.

  Beautiful teeth? Who were we talking about, Seabiscuit? My wife, a physician, tends to be a little clinical at times. Sometimes I catch her taking my pulse or listening to my heart murmur while I think we’re making love. So the fact that she would sit across from a beautiful woman and mainly notice her teeth should not have surprised me. In fact, Anne is fascinated with, and jealous of, anyone with better teeth than she, which is to say just about anyone born after about 1970.

  “Her teeth? Not really,” I said, being more interested in my burgeoning dirty-fingernail fetish.

  We hired Bridget even though she had never designed a vegetable garden. Who has, after all? People hire landscape architects to design entire landscapes, or patio and pool plantings, or civic gardens. Who hires a professional to figure out where to put the tomatoes? You put down a few railroad ties and throw down some seeds, right? Not us.

  After two years of staring at “the baseball field,” the elongated, sloping piece of land in a hollow between our kitchen and the neighbors’ driveway, and after hours of studying garden-design books, we still hadn’t a clue how to proceed. We wanted something more than the usual boring rectangular beds. We wanted a little pizzazz with our parsley. And it was, to be sure, a challenging space. Bordered on our neighbors’ side by a railroad-tie retaining wall and on the opposite side by our ninety-year-old stone wall, the garden was oddly below grade and, after a rain, held water like a huge sponge. Furthermore, it sloped about fifteen feet along its seventy-five-foot length, so some type of terracing seemed inevitable. We needed professional help.

  The fact that we even had a suitable plot for a garden had come as a bit of a surprise. We had nicknamed the area “the baseball field” because both before and after we moved into our house, the neighborhood kids used it daily for baseball. Not our kids, of course. Katie was still a toddler, and Zach—well, the most useful thing Zach had ever done with a baseball bat was to use it at age five to reach the screen door latch, locking me out of the house while I was waiting on the porch with my glove and ball. He wanted to stay inside and read, not play baseball with his dad.

  So the four of us watched from afar as the kids next door played spirited baseball games in the field. We assumed the land belonged to our next-door neighbors Larry and Claire, whose two sons spent most of their summer afternoons on it. We watched curiously that first summer as the games became difficult when the unmowed grass grew ankle high, then stopped altogether when the grass reached knee height. One day I finally flagged Larry down while he was mowing the rest of his yard and asked why he’d stopped mowing the field. He looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, “Because it’s yours,” gave a tug on his mower, and was off.

  Ours? My first, instinctive reaction was, “Wow, I’ve got more land than I
thought! What a deal!” I ran inside to tell Anne. She was, well, unimpressed. Or more accurately, not interested. Clearly the territorial gene resides on the Y chromosome. But even my landowner’s euphoria quickly faded to a more sobering, “Jesus, this worthless patch of lawn is going to add another half hour of mowing every week.” Not to mention that it was now midsummer and the grass had grown to a height of two feet. My third reaction—if you can call a thought that takes several years to arrive a reaction—was, “What a great spot for a kitchen garden.” Not a mere patch for a few tomatoes and baseball-bat-size zucchini (we had already done that), but a real, landscaped, eat-your-heart-out-Monet, gardenmagazine-quality garden—only we would grow mainly vegetables instead of flowers in it.

  Bridget, she of the Scandinavian green eyes and strawberry blond hair, with her perfect teeth and botanical Latin, would design it. Her husband, a landscaper who specialized in garden construction, would build it. One contractor, no hassle. That’s the way we like it.

  Bridget had promised us a preliminary plan in two weeks. As it was just early summer, we had plenty of time. Our goal was to have construction started by Labor Day; that would allow plenty of time to complete the project before the autumn rains turned our yard into a quagmire of slick yellow clay. We really wanted the garden completed by fall, because we were eager to get early potatoes, peas, and spinach planted the following March. If construction was delayed till spring, who knew when it would be completed, and we would lose a half year of crops. Bridget readily agreed that Labor Day was no problem.

  Two weeks came and went, then three. No plan. Two months passed. Finally Bridget called. She had the plans, behind schedule, she acknowledged, but worth waiting for. A few days later, Bridget arrived, still late, breathless, and blond. And smelling of the earth, of a fresh potato patch. She unrolled a large, professional-looking blueprint onto the kitchen table, smoothing it out under her dirty fingernails. It was a lovely work of art, with carefully drawn circles for shrubs, and smaller circles for plants, and little curly things for flowers, with (of course) Latin names indicated for everything. The content, however, was not what I had envisioned. Her design was essentially rows of rectangular beds, separated by two grass paths running up the middle and transversely across the garden. There were some nice touches: where the paths intersected, she had put in stone circles with birdbaths or ornaments, and she had a nice stone staircase descending to the sunken garden. It was a perfectly fine garden, it was just a little… I struggled for a word, just the right word, as Bridget nervously studied my face. “Cartesian,” I said.