{"id":63,"date":"2007-10-31T09:25:13","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T17:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=63"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:25","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:25","slug":"review-the-64-tomato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/review-the-64-tomato\/","title":{"rendered":"Review–The $64 Tomato"},"content":{"rendered":"

REVIEW–THE $64 TOMATO<\/em><\/font><\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 William Alexander is in love with his garden.\u00a0 His book, The $64 Tomato <\/em>(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), is awash in the kind of passion, frustration, irony and jubilation that you only experience while in the thralls of an ongoing affair.\u00a0 Of course, Alexander has a life outside the garden, complete with a wife, children, a rambling old fixer-upper house and a job as an IT director, but it is the garden that pushes him to his limits.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The love affair started, as many do, with a lot of idealism.\u00a0 Early on, right after the land was graded and prepared for cultivation; Alexander rhapsodized about the soil, describing its aroma as “an almost aphrodisiac smell.”\u009d\u00a0 Shortly thereafter the author found, to his dismay, that the aphrodisiac had a particularly positive affect on weed seeds, forcing him to delve into large-scale weed removal methods at the same time as he was planting his first crops of corn, tomatoes and other vegetables and herbs.\u00a0 Later on he learned a another hard lesson about weeds, or at least undesirable plants, when he discovered that maintaining the flowery meadow of his dreams involved fighting with Mother Nature rather than embracing her.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lovers frequently harbor illusions about the objects of their affections, and Alexander is no different.\u00a0 He began with a strong desire to be as “green”\u009d and organic as possible, especially with his new apple trees.\u00a0 An infestation of tent caterpillars and a bout with cedar-apple rust disease changed his perspective.\u00a0 In the end he gained an orchard full of apples but abandoned his commitment to organic growing.\u00a0 The limitations of a newly acquired reel lawnmower eventually forced him to abandon it in favor of a more efficient gas-driven mower.\u00a0 His roses brought him joy, along with the need to treat them for Japanese beetles and blackspot, while his bluegrass became infested with sod webworms, which also required chemical controls.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The story was much the same with garden varmints, especially deer, groundhogs and squirrels.\u00a0 His wife’s disillusionment was even more profound.\u00a0 A peace-loving flower gardener in the beginning, she was transformed when deer attacked her ornamentals.\u00a0 When a patient later asked about deer proofing, she recommended shooting the four-footed marauders. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like Peter Mayle’s bestseller, A Year in Provence<\/em>, Alexander’s book is filled with colorful local characters.\u00a0 These include “Christopher Walken,”\u009d the disturbing gardener who resembles the actor; Bridget, the alluring garden designer, and Cory, the local tree surgeon who narrowly missed electrocution when he ran afoul of the Alexanders’ electric fence.\u00a0 The book’s longest running joke is that everyone in the author’s small Hudson Valley town knows or has had some connection with the “big, brown house”\u009d where the Alexander family lives.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The title of the book says it all.\u00a0 This is the story of how much it really costs–in physical, emotional and intellectual capital as well as dollars–to produce something as simple as a tomato.\u00a0 Even after he has lost most of his illusions, Alexander enjoys his tomatoes, apples, peaches and all the other fruits of his labors.\u00a0 Some of the best parts of the book are about cooking, because the gardener is as enthusiastic in the kitchen as he is outdoors.<\/font><\/p>\n

The author has a lot to say about the interconnections in nature, and how those connections sometimes defeat a gardener’s best intentions.\u00a0 As an organic gardener, who has also done battle with Japanese beetles, ground hogs and grubs, I wish that Alexander had persisted longer in pursuing organic solutions.\u00a0 In my experience, if you combine organic controls, Integrated Pest Management and a degree of tolerance for some amount of crop or flower loss, eventually your garden will begin balancing itself.\u00a0 Not every rose will be perfect, and you will always have some Japanese beetles, but eventually their numbers will get down to something that you can tolerate.\u00a0 On the other hand, defaulting to deer fencing and other critter barriers makes a lot more sense and saves a lot more plants than spraying endlessly with “natural”\u009d deer and rodent deterrents.<\/font><\/p>\n

The $64 Tomato<\/em> is a funny, loving look at the life of a “gentleman farmer”\u009d.\u00a0 Most of us can sympathize with a gardener who must balance the demands of work and family with the desire to spend every waking minute with the plants.\u00a0 When I finished the book, I had the distinct sense that if the author inherited a lot of money or made a bundle writing books, he would probably quit his day job in favor of the gardening life.\u00a0 By the end, he is contemplating changes in the garden to accommodate life’s realities, including his own aging process.\u00a0 Alexander’s musings remind me of Jefferson’s famous line, “I am still devoted to the garden, but tho an old man, I am but a young gardener.”\u009d<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

REVIEW–THE $64 TOMATO \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 William Alexander is in love with his garden.\u00a0 His book, The $64 Tomato (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), is awash in the kind of passion, frustration, irony and jubilation that you only experience while in the thralls of an ongoing affair.\u00a0 Of course, Alexander has a life outside the garden, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1715,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/1715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}