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ArcaMax Publishing > Home & Garden > Recipes

Tales from the ArcaMax Chef

Last time I was continuing my story (the never ending story?) about the third year I grew tomatoes in my garden. Years one and two were tremendously successful and I didn't do anything but stick the plants in the ground and water them when they looked like they were going to die. I had the nicest crop of fresh tomatoes all summer both years. I figured I was a born expert at growing tomatoes ... a green thumb with plenty of red highlights.

I couldn't figure out what the problem was with growing tomatoes. All I ever heard from people was how difficult it was to actually get the tomatoes from the garden to the kitchen table due to bugs, blight, vermin, varmints, worms and other worries (You were wondering where I was going to get the last "w" from in that sentence, weren't you?).

In year three the muskrats from the salt marsh behind my house found my garden. Actually, they found the fermented fruit under my fruit trees first and, having developed a case of the munchies, went looking for a tomato chaser to go with the fruit wine. They could not be stopped with a simple fence; the inebriated muskrats were emboldened and scaled the four foot chicken wire with ease.

I put a chicken wire lid on the garden and that worked. Nothing could touch my tomatoes now ... it would take an act of God to get through that maximum security garden.

On a particularly hot and humid day right before the main crop of tomatoes had reached their peak, there had been warnings all day about severe weather. I wasn't that worried; there had been warnings of such weather all summer and we had been missed each time. As the afternoon wore on, however, the sky took on an eerie appearance. By late after noon, I could hear the rumbles of thunder in the distance. All too soon, the area in the horizon, the area that storms routinely would come from if we were going to get severe weather, turned black ...

Note to readers: I know people in this country and around the World have been experiencing some terrible weather problems this year. I hope no one thinks I am being thoughtless in writing about my experiences with a storm that happened many years ago. My heart and prayers go out to everyone who has experienced any loss due to the terrible storms this year. The truth is, I think I started in on this story when it was still snowing and I didn't intend for the story to culminate in the middle of storm season.

God Bless America.

Enjoy!



This news arrived on: 05/16/2008

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