Last year, we decided to take our love for that most delicious, transcendental of summer vegetables to new heights. We built a 100 square foot, raised redwood garden bed to be the incubator and home for our tomato seedlings. If you’ve ever grown a tomato yourself, watching it’s transformation from a tiny seedling to a jungle of branches and fruits and waited with near-indecent anticipation for that first succulent, juicy fruit to be ready; and then taken the first bite of a fresh-off-the-vine tomato (washing optional)), you can understand our passion (and perhaps financially irrational act. After all, financially speaking, the breakeven point for that garden bed will be about 20 years, but it will be twenty years of tomato indulgence. I think eating a home-grown tomato under the summer sun, it’s juice and seeds running down your face, should be a pleasure enjoyed by everyone. It is the simplest and most sublime of culinary pleasures and puts to shame those red imposters to tomato-ness that you find in your local grocery store. I’m not saying I hear the Hallelujah Chorus when I take that first bite, but I have heard faint strains of Puccini (I swear)
