Compost Heap Oreganato
I can’t say what possessed me to buy the tomato plants. Me planting tomatoes is the definition of foolish optimism. Last year, my yield on three plants was two tomatoes. They were about the size of ping-pong balls, one bite each, but what delectable bites they were, Platonic tomato-ness.
Based on my yields of the past two or three years, I should have skipped the plants altogether, but hope is a tenacious thing, and I think I felt a certain obligation to have tomatoes in the garden. My neighbor Iris always has some, and she has, in past years, coached me on how to care for mine, including showing me how to pinch them in "the crotch," as Iris calls it, giggling a bit as if she's just shared something a bit naughty. I know that, when the guy at the garden stand, in response to my request for a recommendation, suggested two different varieties, and I found both still available and a third that just sounded good, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I came home with twelve tomato plants.
Twelve tomato plants forced my hand; in order to have a place to put them, I now had to do something about the oregano and the tarragon that, together, had overrun the back bed. I had been planning for this for some time and had bought, last fall, I believe, two enormous glazed pots to put some oregano and some tarragon in, to contain them rather like I contain my mint plants. So I began digging up an area about two feet by seven or eight feet of herbs. Sixteen or so square feet of herbs; it was the most deliciously fragrant weeding I’ve ever done. Between ripping out great clusters of oregano and tarragon, accidentally uprooting the rosemary, crushing a fennel plant, and brushing against the blooming lavender, even to my injured olfactory sense, the scent was intoxicating.
Now, that there are--and I know this will make some of you cry--piles of drying oregano and tarragon on the compost heap, I’m wondering how long the garden will smell like a Mediterranean kitchen.
