Master of none, or, on how growing almost no tomatoes (again) in 2021 was kind of okay and also maybe a metaphor for life.

When my tomatoes didn't grow in 2020 I understood. I had theories, I had made mistakes, there was a lot else going on in my city and the world that deserved more of my attention. (I mean, as always, obviously, but moreso.) 

Some of my first, and only, fully ripe tomatoes of 2021

In 2021 I re-upped my committment to building my soil, did my usual bed rotation, took more care with my little tomato seedlings at transplant, and watched them grow strong and healthy, as they had for the 15 or so years of gardening previous to 2020, and set copious fruit. And there they hung, green and swollen, a few ripening here and there, one Black beauty with it's blue-black shoulders and rose red blushing belly, the first smattering of Sungolds, glowing like the nightly orb of the sun dipping below a wild-fire horizon,  a few handfuls of basic, reliable red pear cherries, firm and crimson, a couple Opalka romas, one Black Krim. But when we left for a week in the Boundary Waters in mid-August, my two Gold Medal plants - my favorites - were laden with fruit that were all either still green or ripening unevenly. Their green patches were not just on the shoulders but all over, green and hard faint yellow wedges covering half or more of each fruit. I was worried they'd all ripen for our house sitter leaving none for me, but when we returned they looked the same as when we'd left, and the other tomatoes were scarcely ripening either. 

My precious Gold Medals, all patchy and weird

Coming back from vacation always throws me for a loop, and the start of September too. My work starts to pick up, school starts for my kid, the Jewish high holydays throw a few extra days worth of activities my way, and my emotional and physical energy tanks with the swiftly decreasing hours of daylight. So it took me a while to really confront the scope of the problem with the tomatoes, to wrap my head around it, to realize they were not going to ripen, at all, and the internet's initial suggestions of maybe a little overwatering or over fertilizing were not only annoying (it's a freaking drought - how much was I supposed to water) but wrong. 

The tomatoes weren't the only problem I was half ignoring. I'd had white flies swarming my kale since at least July. Kale! In previous years, once I'd safely sheperded my baby kale crops past the cutworms that liked to mow them down in my last garden and the ants that like to girdle them in this one, I'd never had to pay them any mind to provide for multiple dinners a week for months on end. But now I was throwing away yellowed leaves by the pile, and clouds of little white dots rose up every time I approached to find what good leaves I could. We still had enough to eat, but not an abundance. I sprayed a bit of something organic that would still dry their little bodies up, but then I worried about the pollinators hovering nearby and didn't keep it up. Here too it wasn't until late August that I got serious, turning the vacuum I'd just used to clean out the car after our trip onto the undersides of each and every leaf in the brassica bed, and the eggplants down the way, and I tried to do the tomatoes in between too - all of them now speckled with tiny white dots, though not to the degree of the kale. I followed with more organic poison - some websites suggested I could try just water, but others scoffed that the flies would rise and resettle within minutes, and from my brief attempt, I decided the hard stuff was necessary.

Asparagus coated in aphid eggs

 There was more. I had my perennial problems of squash borers and cucumber wilt, and something I never quite figured out bothering the beans, but not enough to shut down the harvest. And it would be several more weeks before I'd realize that the bushy new growth on my asparagus was the sign of yet another new pest, asparagus aphids, sometimes also called European asaparagus aphids. Again I'd go straight for the insecticidal soap spray, along with some selective pruning of the fronds most densely coated with scales of blue grey aphid eggs. But within a few seconds of pumping my fingers open and closed, covering the ferns in poison, I'd see the plant was also covered in dozens and dozens of lady bugs in all their stages, little black tailed caterpillars, immobile light red pupae ridged like a miniature Sydney opera house, and shiny spotted adults wandering after their lunch. My hand would freeze mid-squeeze, knowing that the spray would kill not only my enemy (and probably not enough of them to really solve the problem) but also the helpers that had flocked here specifically to feast on them. Luckily it would turn out that unlike white flies, aphids and their lines of little grey eggs cannot fly up to evade a jet of water, and each branch would look clean after I sprayed it hard against my hand. 

   

First though, the tomatoes. I came up with a new theory, a mosaic virus. Maybe I could see marbling of the leaves, and now not only were tomatoes ripening unevenly on all nine of my plants, but some had necrosis - hard brown patches - on the fruits. I noticed that the milkweed growing in that bed and many others also had brightly mottled leaves, as did some of my raspberries. But the mosaic viruses I read about were mostly acquired by getting infected plants, not by bugs, and I had started all of my tomatoes, and virtually everything in my garden, from seed. The few purchased snap dragons and gifted marigolds did not themselves appear to be infected, so they were unlikely vectors, and if I had purchased infected seed my plants should have been stunted and small, not big and healthy before they started showing signs of disease. I thought about testing a sample at the U of M plant disease clinic but it was $45, and a woman at the lab advised me over the phone that since there was nothing to be done but pull the plants anyway and hope to avoid it next time, why bother. This made sense, and I thought I'd made up my mind. 

Then at the farmers market that weekend, I saw the master gardeners, just as they were packing up their table. "My tomatoes aren't ripening," I said, and ran down what I'd learned and not so far, and what the lady at the lab had said. 

"Oh I would test if I were you, just to know, you know?" One of them said.
"I do kind of want to know how resentful to be, and if there's anyway productive to direct my anger." They laughed, but as soon as I said it I realized it was completely true. I was feeling totally frustrated and kind of ashamed, to put so much into my garden and have so many problems with it. 
"Have you ever thought about becoming a master gardener?" One of the women asked.
"Not really," I said surprised, "My grandfather was one, I guess I never thought about it." I responded, which I really hadn't.
"Oh you sound like a natural, you're asking all the right questions and paying attention to all the right things." 

I went home that afternoon and pulled all the tomatoes and the tomato plants. I bagged the worst hit Gold Medal in a separate plastic bag for the lab, which wouldn't open again until Tuesday. When they called with the results they told me they'd had to autoclave my sample because of the number of white flies still on board. It had a "potyvirus," (a group of viruses named, I learned, because once upon a time they originated in potatoes) which is not a mosaic virus and is easily spread by aphids and other insects. "Don't grow tomatoes or anything else susceptible in that bed for three years," they suggested, "pull the top inch of soil to make sure you get all the plant material, you'll be lucky to beat it." 

Ever since I decided to get the test, and even moreso once I dropped off the sample, I had felt so relieved just knowing I was going to know, and even after the bad news (I certainly do not have space in my yard to take 3 years off of one bed, nor to expect that whatever was there hadn't already had a chance to spread farther) I felt kind of happy. An uncharacteristically self-forgiving thought occurred to me: I don't know how I'll deal with this, but afterward I guess I'll know how to deal with one more thing. 

Maybe becomeing a masterful gardener is not so much about increasing perfection and abundance in the garden, though hopefully there's a little of that, but about learning to deal with more and more problems. There are so many things I did not know how to handle when I started, that I now monitor for every year and nip in the bud or at least usually can mangage well enough for long enough to still get a crop. I brush leaf miner eggs off my spinach and chard each spring while I drink my morning coffee. I hunted enough cutworms, stalking my garden with a head lamp, paring knife, and jar of cornmeal, that they were scarcely a problem by the time I left my old garden, and if they ever surface here they won't get far. I know the squash borer lays its eggs like clockwork over 4th of July weekend and I flick them off with a knife, delaying and avoiding most of the need to slice open my plants and cut out the black-headed grubs. Next year I will finally try fabric and a trap crop too. I muscle through cucumber wilt, pick off asparagus beetles until they subside, cut back the mint when the three lined plant bugs get too thick and get a second undamaged crop coming in a month later. Sometimes I have felt embarrassed to find there are new pests and diseases introducing themselves to me, but there's no need to lay that on top of good old frustration. Garden problems suck because I want the fruits of my labor, and my primary orientation as a gardener is to want more, and feel there is never enough sun or space for all the piles of food I want to grow. But s**t happens. And if my years of garden problems are a qualification, not a failure, what else in my life can I learn to see like that?