Minutes after we are introduced to people as the owners of a lush acre and a half in Kerala, the entire room can hear the furious whirr of backpedalling as soon as someone asks, “So, you grow all your own vegetables?” Nnnnno, we stammer. The shade is too thick, the soil is too thin, we don’t actually ... well, we have chillies, lots of chillies.
Our farming career is a history of high hopes and deplorable timing, but we still cheer when we harvest a brinjal and two lady’s fingers. We proudly slurp the resulting sambar, relieved that we have other jobs that actually put food on the table.
But when it comes to that most beloved fruit, the tomato, emotions run high. There was the September we returned from an Italian holiday with bright seed packets promising a crop of grape tomatoes and large tomatoes. Half of them were planted in sacks on the terrace. “Let’s use pots instead so we can move them around if we need to,” I said. “The sacks will hold more soil,” he insisted. “Let’s keep all the plants on the terrace,” I said. “No, we’ll plant some seeds near the pond,” he said.
After we hauled water up the stairs and down the slope all season, and after the peacocks had finished snacking, we did harvest three or four kilos of tomatoes. True, tomatoes were just then selling at their cheapest in the market, but ours were divine and could just be popped into the mouth. The following year we fell in with a group of “real” organic farmers who shared seeds with us, wrapped up in stray receipts and bus tickets. We probably averaged one plant for every 20 seeds, each yielding two tomatoes at most. “This is not how seeds work, is it?” I asked. “We’re supposed to get more fruits and seeds every year, not fewer.” “Let’s try another batch,” he said. “I’ve got plenty more packets.”
Then a fellow gardening enthusiast counted out into my hand five precious seeds of a dark tomato called Black Prince. We took them home, planted them in a pot and obtained one plant. It put out one flower, which developed into one fruit. I watched that fruit day after day and when it ripened I instantly devoured the Black Prince so that we could not save any more seeds. Last year he grew four tomato plants over my heated protests that we obviously couldn’t figure out the correct time for sowing. He emptied out all the rain barrels to preserve them through a brutal summer. The plants sagged and slouched like teenagers in front of the TV and finally yielded four tomatoes. We could have used all that water to save our new trees, I yelled.
This year I agitated for a year-long moratorium on vegetable planting. I threatened to yank out any seedling that might sprout. Then I found two brave seedlings thrusting their way between the bricks on the path. I potted them up and took them to the terrace.
His secret weapon was a packet of Burpee tomato seeds sent from the USA. Burpee seed packets are a wonder of agro-precision, with coloured bands telling you exactly when to plant for the latitude in which you live. Born in a lab, calibrated by white-coated technicians and raised in nutrient-balanced potting soil by instruction-following Americans, Burpee seeds reliably yield heaps of tomatoes. By October, if you put on night-vision goggles, you can spot householders in suburbs across the USA leaving sacks of tomatoes on each other’s doorsteps and fleeing before they can be caught.
But can we leave a Burpee seed to the tender mercies of an Indian garden? No, no more than you let an American swimming champ cross the Trichy Road by himself. Plant a seed in Indian soil and an ant will inevitably carry it away. If it sprouts, it will be scorched by drought, lashed by torrents, whipped by cyclonic winds. All our Burpee seeds were potted up for the terrace garden, a safe distance away from the Indian ones.
Every time we go up to the terrace now we check on His tomatoes versus My tomatoes. We remain civilized: he jiggles the flowers on all the plants to pollinate them and I weed without prejudice. But my indigenous plants put out 15 fruits before his got around to flowering. Not that I was being competitive.
I counted my triumphs too soon, though. A solid month of rain kept my tomatoes from ripening and one fruit after another burst through its skin. Yesterday I gave up and plucked the rest to make a green tomato chutney. For now there is a ceasefire, but tomato season has just begun.
