First, Altadena Hiker posts this lovely photo (you can read the original post here—it’s quite nice):
Tomato envy is a big deal in these out-West parts. Oh, we feign niceness, we pepper each other with niceties. But let’s face it, the green thumbs out here (I am not in their number) are in pitched battle to grow the Best Tomato West of the Rockies.
I don’t care who’s growing. Tomatoes are better back east. There. I’ve said it.
The Scout has been growing Early Girls and Purple Cherokees this summer, but his plants are too much stalk without enough broad leaf. Is he over-watering? His admiration for the Hiker’s tomatoes resulted in the following (to the tune of California Girls by the Beach Boys):
Well east coast fruits are hip
I really dig the red they wear
And the southern shades with the way they stalk
They knock me out how well they bear
The mid-west beef marauders really make me eat a fright
And the northern looms are the heirs so fair
They keep the palate warm and bright
I wish they all could be ‘Dena Hiker’s
I wish they all could be ‘Dena Hiker’s
I wish they all could be Hiker’s early girls
What The Scout lacks in green thumbery is made up for by clever wordsmithery. He’s my Best Boy.
West Coast Grrlie Blather 
Could it be the Hiker hasn’t seen this yet? She’ll be so pleased.
I will not pepper the grower with niceties, I’d rather pepper my tomato with pepper. But is it true? Tomatoes are better in the east? I don’t remember having had that experience. It’s an honest question.
She hadn’t, and now she is.
I love the Scout; he’s so saucy.
Stephen and I spent many weekends with our Dad in the greenhouses where he worked at the Geneva branch of Cornell’s Agricultural Experiment Station. Our mother must have appreciated those afternoons when we went with Dad, although she was just as often there too, as his faithful assistant. The smells and textures of a greenhouse are so lovely: the rich chocolatey soil, soft as silk; the crunchy white peat; the rotten-egg stench of sulfur blocks. Stephen and I would bring our cars and drive them on the concrete walkways. We’d take frequent trips into different rooms of the long row of greenhouses, which were barren on weekends but never dark, saturated with the flourescent glow of artificial light competing with the sun streaming in the dirty glass.I dream sometimes still of greenhouses. Of dark brown dirt running between my fingers, of the periodic hiss of the radiator and the chug of the automatic watering system kicking in. Of tables and tables in room after room of living things–brown sticks of apple trees, purple cabbages, and lush green tomato plants.