I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  And I’ve heard there are no such things as free puppies or kittens.  But at a time when worries about scarcity seem epidemic, I’m going to share a story about abundance, courtesy of a tomato plant named Tom.

Tom came to me this summer, thanks to my favorite nursery. I was loaded up with hanging baskets and more annuals than I’d intended to buy when the cashier pointed to a cart by the check-out. It was full of pots with green vines slumping to the floor.

“Feel free to take a tomato plant,” she offered. “No charge. We’re clearing them out.”

I’ve never tried my hand at raising vegetables – only flowers.  But who doesn’t love a bargain?

I grabbed a plant, named him “Tom” because that was the only remaining part of his broken plastic marker, and headed to the car. He looked pretty thirsty, just this side of death. The price being what it was – or wasn’t – neither of us had much to lose.

The first days were iffy.  I dug a hole by the back fence, plopped him in, and tied him to the boards with string. Otherwise, he would have passed out across the back bed.  For a few days, I watered him to no avail.  His leaves still slumped.  Then several days in, I noticed that a single watering would perk him up for about 12 hours before he bowed his head and went blah.

My gardening persistence is generally not impressive, but for some reason I kept this up for week or so until voilà, the lawn sprinkler seemed to be enough and Tom started flexing his muscles – actually climbing up the fence, sneaking through it to my neighbor’s side of the fence, and crawling out with the enthusiasm of a kudzu vine to embrace the little Buddha statue that sits on the edge of the bed.  As with most things – thunderstorms, snowstorms, squirrels – Buddha did not flinch.  He paid no attention to the fact that Tom was now producing an impressive collection of tiny yellow flowers.

By now, the neighbor, more vigilant than Buddha, had either noticed the flowers or had trouble mowing his lawn and erected an impressive metal trellis on his side of the fence to somehow tame Tom. Encouraged by the flowers, I applied a little fertilizer, in hopes of pushing out tomatoes.

Apparently, it worked because within a couple of weeks, I had a single tomato vine on my side covering both Buddha and 30 square feet, along with at least three dozen green tomatoes, a few about to turn orange. At that point, it became a contest between me and some critter – I think a rabbit – to see who could get to the ripe ones first.  When I noticed we were running two for two (and my two were delicious), I started picking the green ones and following all the gratuitous advice I received about how to ripen them off the vine.

Informed now that tomatoes produce something called ethylene, which makes them ripen, and that I could expedite the process by stashing green ones in brown paper bags, I headed to the store to stock up on paper bags, which were soon littering my back porch tables.

Dinner guests, noticing the bags, offered more advice.

“Put a banana in each bag,” said one. “It will go faster.” So I was off to the store for bananas. But the process was slow, and Tom kept producing green tomatoes.

The logical next step was to work with what I had, which meant returning to the store for corn meal to find out if the “easy” air fryer recipe for fried green tomatoes was actually easy, in which case I probably had enough tomato supplies to open a small restaurant. It was, and with a little Remoulade sauce on the side, they were delicious.  Good thing because frost was coming and the plot Tom had taken over was the only place I could plant my new weeping cherry tree.

By the time three guys from the nursery had arrived with shovels and the tree, I did the unthinkable – thanked Tom, then chopped him into two-foot chunks, deposited his stalks into two garbage bags and plunked his green tomatoes – 65 of them! – into a couple of buckets.

I hear that stored properly (no ethylene), green tomatoes can last almost a year.  Or if I don’t mind a “rustic feel,” I could hang them from my kitchen ceiling to ripen them. But since Tom had come to me for free, it seemed only right to pay it forward.

Friends with air fryers have been eating a lot of fried green tomatoes, and Buddha, sitting under the cherry tree, can finally see the light of day.

Thank you, Tom.

Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder