The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
304
The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
304eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565125841 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2007 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 853,323 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
William Alexander, the author of two critically acclaimed books, lives in New York's Hudson Valley. By day the IT director at a research institute, he made his professional writing debut at the age of fifty-three with a national bestseller about gardening, The $64 Tomato. His second book, 52 Loaves, chronicled his quest to bake the perfect loaf of bread, a journey that took him to such far-flung places as a communal oven in Morocco and an abbey in France, as well as into his own backyard to grow, thresh, and winnow wheat. The Boston Globe called Alexander "wildly entertaining," the New York Times raved that "his timing and his delivery are flawless," and the Minneapolis Star Tribune observed that "the world would be a less interesting place without the William Alexanders who walk among us." A 2006 Quill Book Awards finalist, Alexander won a Bert Greene Award from the IACP for his article on bread, published in Saveur magazine. A passion bordering on obsession unifies all his writing. He has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and at the National Book Festival in Washington DC and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages, where he has opined on such issues as the Christmas tree threatening to ignite his living room and the difficulties of being organic. Now, in Flirting with French, he turns his considerable writing talents to his perhaps less considerable skills: becoming fluent in the beautiful but maddeningly illogical French language.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden
Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above. — Katharine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen
Bridget arrived for her interview late, breathless, and blond. As we drank herbal tea around the kitchen table, she dug deep into a leather portfolio, emerging with glossy photographs of gardens she had designed for previous clients. Anne ooh-aahed over the photographs, which looked like rather ordinary gardens to me, but to be fair, I was only seeing them peripherally. My eyes were riveted on the hands holding the photographs. Delicate, lightly freckled hands with dirty — filthy — fingernails. Real gardener's fingernails. The effect was startling, at once repulsive and erotic. The phrase whore in the bedroom, horticulturist in the garden popped into my head. I tried to blink it away. When I finally looked up, Bridget smiled and squinted her crinkly green eyes at me. A winkless wink. Had I been caught ogling her dirty hands?
After reviewing her credentials and our project, we strolled through the property, Bridget and I falling into lockstep as Anne trailed slightly behind. Passing various anonymous plants and flowers, Bridget would point to what was to me some nameless weedy shrub and exclaim in a breathless whisper something like, "Ah, a beautiful Maximus clitoris." She knew all the botanical names, the Latin rolling off her tongue like steamy profanity in the heat of passion.
We hired Bridget on the spot, without interviewing anyone else. It seems she'd made an impression on Anne as well.
"Did you notice her beautiful teeth?" Anne sighed as Bridget drove off in her battered Toyota, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and noise.
Beautiful teeth? Who were we talking about, Seabiscuit? My wife, a physician, tends to be a little clinical at times. Sometimes I catch her taking my pulse or listening to my heart murmur while I think we're making love. So the fact that she would sit across from a beautiful woman and mainly notice her teeth should not have surprised me. In fact, Anne is fascinated with, and jealous of, anyone with better teeth than she, which is to say just about anyone born after about 1970.
"Her teeth? Not really," I said, being more interested in my burgeoning dirty-fingernail fetish.
We hired Bridget even though she had never designed a vegetable garden. Who has, after all? People hire landscape architects to design entire landscapes, or patio and pool plantings, or civic gardens. Who hires a professional to figure out where to put the tomatoes? You put down a few railroad ties and throw down some seeds, right? Not us.
After two years of staring at "the baseball field," the elongated, sloping piece of land in a hollow between our kitchen and the neighbors' driveway, and after hours of studying garden-design books, we still hadn't a clue how to proceed. We wanted something more than the usual boring rectangular beds. We wanted a little pizzazz with our parsley. And it was, to be sure, a challenging space. Bordered on our neighbors' side by a railroad-tie retaining wall and on the opposite side by our ninety-year-old stone wall, the garden was oddly below grade and, after a rain, held water like a huge sponge. Furthermore, it sloped about fifteen feet along its seventy-five-foot length, so some type of terracing seemed inevitable. We needed professional help.
The fact that we even had a suitable plot for a garden had come as a bit of a surprise. We had nicknamed the area "the baseball field" because both before and after we moved into our house, the neighborhood kids used it daily for baseball. Not our kids, of course. Katie was still a toddler, and Zach — well, the most useful thing Zach had ever done with a baseball bat was to use it at age five to reach the screen door latch, locking me out of the house while I was waiting on the porch with my glove and ball. He wanted to stay inside and read, not play baseball with his dad.
So the four of us watched from afar as the kids next door played spirited baseball games in the field. We assumed the land belonged to our next-door neighbors Larry and Claire, whose two sons spent most of their summer afternoons on it. We watched curiously that first summer as the games became difficult when the unmowed grass grew ankle high, then stopped altogether when the grass reached knee height. One day I finally flagged Larry down while he was mowing the rest of his yard and asked why he'd stopped mowing the field. He looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, "Because it's yours," gave a tug on his mower, and was off.
Ours? My first, instinctive reaction was, "Wow, I've got more land than I thought! What a deal!" I ran inside to tell Anne. She was, well, unimpressed. Or more accurately, not interested. Clearly the territorial gene resides on the Y chromosome. But even my landowner's euphoria quickly faded to a more sobering, "Jesus, this worthless patch of lawn is going to add another half hour of mowing every week." Not to mention that it was now midsummer and the grass had grown to a height of two feet. My third reaction — if you can call a thought that takes several years to arrive a reaction — was, "What a great spot for a kitchen garden." Not a mere patch for a few tomatoes and baseball-bat-size zucchini (we had already done that), but a real, landscaped, eat-your-heart-out-Monet, gardenmagazine-quality garden — only we would grow mainly vegetables instead of flowers in it.
Bridget, she of the Scandinavian green eyes and strawberry blond hair, with her perfect teeth and botanical Latin, would design it. Her husband, a landscaper who specialized in garden construction, would build it. One contractor, no hassle. That's the way we like it.
Bridget had promised us a preliminary plan in two weeks. As it was just early summer, we had plenty of time. Our goal was to have construction started by Labor Day; that would allow plenty of time to complete the project before the autumn rains turned our yard into a quagmire of slick yellow clay. We really wanted the garden completed by fall, because we were eager to get early potatoes, peas, and spinach planted the following March. If construction was delayed till spring, who knew when it would be completed, and we would lose a half year of crops. Bridget readily agreed that Labor Day was no problem.
Two weeks came and went, then three. No plan. Two months passed. Finally Bridget called. She had the plans, behind schedule, she acknowledged, but worth waiting for. A few days later, Bridget arrived, still late, breathless, and blond. And smelling of the earth, of a fresh potato patch. She unrolled a large, professional-looking blueprint onto the kitchen table, smoothing it out under her dirty fingernails. It was a lovely work of art, with carefully drawn circles for shrubs, and smaller circles for plants, and little curly things for flowers, with (of course) Latin names indicated for everything. The content, however, was not what I had envisioned. Her design was essentially rows of rectangular beds, separated by two grass paths running up the middle and transversely across the garden. There were some nice touches: where the paths intersected, she had put in stone circles with birdbaths or ornaments, and she had a nice stone staircase descending to the sunken garden. It was a perfectly fine garden, it was just a little ... I struggled for a word, just the right word, as Bridget nervously studied my face. "Cartesian," I said.
Bridget blinked. "Cartesian?"
I looked to Anne for help. She pretended not to know me.
"You know," I said. "Rectangular. Planar. I guess we had something more rambling in mind."
Bridget looked at the plan and thought for a minute, and this is what she must have said to herself: "My husband is going to use Big Machinery to shape and terrace the land; therefore the terraces have to be perpendicular. Irregularly shaped terraces would require him to build them by hand, which he is not about to do at any price."
Obviously, she couldn't say that to a client. Here instead is the translation she supplied to the naive and gullible homeowner.
"The problem is, Bill" — it was strange, tingly, and totally convincing to hear her say my name — "you have to terrace it to deal with the slope, and terraces have to be rectangular."
Oh. Well, that shows how much I know. Of course, terraces have to be rectangular. (It would be some years before I realized the blatant untruth of that statement.) Okay, so much for winding, rambling paths. Rectangular is fine. I moved my attention to the broad, grassy paths. "I don't know that I like the idea of having to mow my garden. Can we put something else in here?"
Bridget crinkled her green eyes at me. "But, Bill, the grass paths will look so grand," she insisted. "So stately. And the mowing is nothing. Two swipes with the mower. You think about it; I know you'll want the grass." I looked to Anne for guidance, but she was gazing at Bridget.
The garden architect flashed her pearlies in Anne's direction. Anne, I think involuntarily, smiled back. What kind of spell had this Valkyrie cast over us?
Okay, rectangular and grassy. Sounds good to me. And she does have all those beautiful architectural symbols and Latin names, and the great teeth. We wrote out a check and agreed we would see her husband around Labor Day.
As Labor Day approached, Anne and I were flush with excitement. We had signed a contract, made a down payment for the construction phase, and spent our idle minutes running our fingers over the smooth blueprints and poring over seed catalogs. One moonless night in August, we grabbed some blankets and lay on our backs in the tall grass in the garden-to-be, touching hands, looking at the constellations, discussing what to plant. We were going to have a two- thousand-square-foot garden next year! To a couple of former city dwellers, this seemed like a small farm. No more agonizing decisions over whether to plant squash or lettuce. We could plant everything. I fancied myself a small farmer, self-sufficient in vegetables for at least several months of the year, and longer for storage crops like potatoes and winter squash. With the occasional shooting star shamelessly egging us on, Anne topped my ambitions with her romantic dreams of canning, making the garden's bounty last twelve months of the year. I responded with homemade sun-dried tomatoes, tasting of sunshine and acidic sweetness.
"Fresh blueberries," Anne moaned, "that turn your lips blue."
"Cherry tomatoes," I countered. "Popped whole into your mouth."
Before long we were rolling in the summer grass, our way of saying farewell to the baseball field with its little vegetable patch and welcoming the kitchen garden.
With these tantalizing visions dangling before us, we didn't mind sacrificing the last few late tomatoes of the year, ripping out the plants and disassembling the beds in anticipation of Big Machinery that would be arriving any day.
Labor Day arrived. No Big Machinery. I called Bridget to try to get a start date.
"George is held up on a job on Long Island," she explained. "He spends every summer working on an estate, and the job's running long this year. But we'll definitely be starting by Columbus Day."
Long Island? That's a hundred miles away. This guy gets around.
"You don't say, Bridget. I'm from Long Island. What town is he in?" As if I didn't know.
"East Hampton."
Great. I've just ripped out my tomatoes, rainy season is approaching, and my landscaper is summering in the Hamptons. Just great.
"I just wouldn't let it slip past Columbus Day," I warned her once I caught my breath. "After the first hard frost hits, our soil gets very slick, and your machinery is going to get stuck on the hill."
"Shouldn't be a problem," Bridget breezed. "George is pretty good with the equipment."
Sure, I wanted to tell her. So was Napoleon until he encountered Russian mud.
Poor thing (Bridget or Napoleon) didn't have a clue. But I had witnessed my own Waterloo after our septic system failed almost as soon as we'd moved into the house (naturally). Actually, it's not quite accurate to say our "septic system" failed. Unknown to (1) our crack home inspector, (2) the bank holding the mortgage, and (3) the novice buyers, our ninety-year-old house did not have anything resembling a septic system. In fact, I didn't even know what a septic system was. The only accommodation for waste was some ancient, brittle clay pipe that ran underground for about a hundred feet down the hill, under an old stone wall (which had partially collapsed the pipe), and into a stone well, whose exact location was a closely held secret. The liquids apparently escaped between the well stones into the surrounding soil, while the solid wastes ... well, I don't know what became of them except that after a few months of our family's flushing the toilets, nothing was going anywhere.
We brought in Lou, a local excavator who was recommended to us by our plumber. He checked my credit, flushed some expensive transmitting device down the toilet, and listened through headphones for the plaintive beep that would reveal the location of the secret well.
It was never heard from again.
We did eventually locate and open the ancient stone tank with the help of a former owner and, after seeing it, immediately came to the conclusion that we needed a new, modern system. Within a few days, Lou had dropped in a twelve-hundred-gallon concrete holding tank and said he'd be back to complete the more time-consuming part of the system — the drainage, or leach, field — in a few weeks, after he'd completed another job. Lou explained helpfully that the way a septic system works is that all effluence goes into a concrete tank planted in your lawn. Near the very top of the tank is a pipe that leads out to a leach field, which consists of a set of underground perforated pipes. As waste enters the tank, solids drop to the bottom, where they are broken down by naturally occurring bacteria. The clean liquids on the surface flow out the pipe to the leach field, where they seep into the earth to be filtered and broken down before reentering the water table.
Grateful for the ability to flush our toilets again, we didn't fuss over the delay or even over the fact that in lieu of a drainage field for the liquid wastes, Lou had run a long hose down to the woods that constitute the lower half of our property. A little pee in the woods for a couple of weeks couldn't hurt anything. And it flowed away from the house.
A couple of weeks stretched into a couple of months. I started calling Lou regularly as the leaves began falling from the trees. I thought I was always polite, but Lou didn't appreciate what he felt was harassment. What had started as a cordial partnership between homeowner and contractor soon turned tense, then rancorous.
"What are you complaining about? At least you can flush your toilet," he snapped once. "Do you think I'm loafing around? I'm taking care of people who can't flush their toilets! I was there for you when you needed me, wasn't I?" He followed with a vague threat about walking off the job if I wasn't happy with him, and hung up. Uhoh. That was the last thing I needed — to start over with a new contractor. I stopped calling.
Either in spite of, because of, or irrespective of my discontinued phone calls, one day in early November, Lou and his backhoe did materialize in the backyard and immediately started making huge gashes in the steeply sloped lawn behind the kitchen. Another day or two and the leach field would be completed.
The next morning we woke to the season's first hard frost, a sparkling carpet of silver across the grass and exposed soil. Lou arrived at 7:30 a.m. and fired up the back-hoe. As I made coffee, I heard unfamiliar whining sounds coming from the machinery, not unlike the sound of a car spinning its wheels on ice. I looked out the window. The backhoe was stuck in the melting frost, the treads whirring helplessly in place. Lou came around to the house.
"I can't do anything here. I'm going to come back around noon, after the sun has dried out the ground." But the low November sun never did dry out the ground, not that day nor the next. There was once a thriving brick industry in town, and apparently a vein of brick-quality clay ran right through our property. Each morning's frost or dew brought more moisture to the clay that lay only inches below the surface of the lawn. Lou gave it a noble effort. I watched, unbelieving, as he "walked" the backhoe up the hill by pushing the blade into the earth and lifting the treads off the ground. But clearly one could not put in a leach field by walking a backhoe around the property. Nevertheless, Lou wasn't ready to give up.
"It's supposed to get warmer next week," he explained. "Let's just leave it untouched, and I'll be back in a week to finish up."
I must have looked doubtful.
"Don't worry, we're going to get this done."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The $64 Tomato"
by .
Copyright © 2006 William Alexander.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents————————
Prologue: Gentleman Farmer 1
Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden 3
We Know Where You Live 21
One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad 47
No Such Thing as Organic Apples 75
You May Be Smarter, But He’s Got More Time 96
Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire) 131
Shell-Shocked: A Return to the Front (Burner) 146
Christopher Walken, Gardener 162
Cereal Killer 186
Statuary Rape 208
Harvest Jam 220
The Existentialist in the Garden 238
The $64 Tomato 247
Childbirth. Da Vinci. Potatoes. 256
Acknowledgments 267
Suggested Reading 269
Recipes for the Paperback Edition 271
What People are Saying About This
“Nature is meant to be accommodated, not dominated, and
The $64 Tomato is William Alexander’s insightful and often hilarious voyage of that discovery. With self-deprecating wit, he spins an engaging tale that teaches important lessons as it entertains.”
—John Grogan, author of Marley & Me
“William Alexander’s intelligent and funny memoir is a tribute to humankind’s irrepressible urge to cultivate the earth. His warm-hearted take on the domestic scene reminds us all that life began in a garden.”
—Katherine Whiteside,
author Antique Flowers and Classic Bulbs
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