August42009
Focus Your Fruits
[Our upright citizens.]
We’re finally getting some tomatoes. You might think we want the plants to grow as big, and produce as much fruit, as possible. This isn’t the case with tomatoes. If we let them go, they would naturally sprawl out along the ground in an unwieldy tangle. When that happens the plant produces more fruit, but ones with less taste that are harder to pick. So we sucker and trellis the plants, picking off the tangential growths before they get too big and training the main stalk to grow upward through a series of strings. We want them to be like ourselves, following a straight path, devoting our energies to a few select ends, instead of diluting our talents in too many directions.
[What your hands look like after suckering tomatoes.]
