As I walk around my neighborhood every morning, taking my dog on a 45-minute stroll, I realize how easy it is to become envious of your neighbors. Some of them have bigger houses. Some of them have fancier cars. Some of them have wider yards.
But the neighbors who truly make me feel envious are the ones who have taller tomato plants. Not just taller, but bushier, with more tomatoes hanging from them than I could swipe in a single night.
I’ve grown tomatoes for a number of years, but my plants have never been more than five feet tall. One of my neighbors, on the other hand, has plants that could dunk on LeBron James.
This year, my plants are growing very slowly, and the few tomatoes on them are quite small. Even my wife has noticed. This worries me. I don’t want to be the first man whose wife left him over the size of his tomatoes.
Size really does matter. If you don’t believe me, just ask Del and Julie Faust of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who set a Guinness World Record in October 2022 with a tomato that weighed 11.65 pounds (5.284 kilograms) and had a circumference of 32.5 inches (82.55 cm). That’s amazing. If I grew a tomato that size, I’d save a lot of money. No gym membership, just biceps curls with the tomato.
But the only Guinness World Record I might have a chance to get is for “World’s Smallest Tomato.” You’d need a microscope to view it — and also to serve it to the models at Paris Fashion Week.
I’ve tried almost everything to get my tomato plants to grow faster. I’ve even tried talking to them. “Come on,” I say. “It’s almost the end of July. Don’t you want to become adults one day?”
I wish I could take them to a plant doctor. But he’d probably just measure them and tell me that they’re in the 19th percentile for height and 17th percentile for weight, but that’s not bad, because they’re growing in an Asian family. “But they’re adopted!” I’d say. “I got them from a nursery when they were little.”
And the plant doctor would shake his head and say, “In that case, you probably aren’t feeding them well.”
But I have been feeding them well. I’ve given them cow manure from some of America’s finest cows. And not just that, but also a fertilizer that’s specially formulated for tomatoes. They’re also getting plenty of water and sunlight. I don’t know what’s missing from their diet. Perhaps they need more fiber.
I’m not sure what my neighbors are doing to produce such large tomatoes, but I have a feeling that some of them are cheating. They’re sneaking outside in the middle of the night to inject their plants with steroids. How else to explain such prolific growth?
Okay, perhaps they’re not “cheating” in the strict sense of the word. But I’m pretty certain that some of them — especially the retired lady in the blue house at the corner — are going into their gardens at night with protein shakes. That would explain why their tomato plants are shooting up like giraffes on drugs.
I’m hoping that some of them can share their secrets with me. If not their secrets, then at least their tomatoes. My Google search history — you won’t be surprised to learn — includes this question: “Can tomatoes be stuck on a plant using super glue?”
I’m really desperate to impress my wife. I also want to leave a legacy of tomato-growing success, so my children and grandchildren can be filled with pride when they read the epitaph of my tombstone:
“Here lies Melvin. He grew huge tomatoes.”
