INSIGHTS

IN MARCH, the monogamous man’s fancy quite often turns to la pomme d’amour, the apple of love, which is just a fancy-pants way of saying home-grown tomatoes.

On the first warm day of spring, the plains and hills of the metropolis come alive with the sounds of Rototillers, hoes, mattocks and curses as men thoroughly softened by winter and suburban life try once again to return to the hardscrabble soil of their forebears.

Once they finally hack through the tight armor of their Bermuda lawns, they open tiny scars in the tough clay that Dallasites foolishly call “dirt.” Then, weary but proud of having plowed a back-forty square feet, they pronounce these holes “tomato gardens” and rush off to the nearest nursery to buy their farming supplies.

The compleat gentleman gardener, on this first buying spree of spring, scoops up at least $100 worth of seeds, plants, fertilizers, soil additives, insecticides and watering gadgets in hopes of growing a few big tomatoes that, come June, could be purchased at the Farmer’s Market for two dollars a plenteous bucket, from the bed of a pickup truck for a dollar a bag or from the produce counter of a supermarket for 39 cents a pound.

Why big tomatoes? In the social hierarchy of city gardening, big tomatoes are macho. Large, red orbs are manly proof that even computer programmers and executive vice presidents can still forage and provide as well as any club-swinging cave dweller. Raising your own Big Boys, Dukes, Whoppers and Beefmasters in your backyard is the new moral equivalent of dragging home a saber-toothed tiger. Only wimps and apartmentites, who scratch around like cats in patio planter boxes, would stoop to grow (sneer) salad tomatoes.

Each spring, I develop such maniacal cravings for fresh home-growns that my very blood looks suspiciously like tomato juice. These pangs have something to do with my roots – and much to do with the plastic taste frequently left on the palate by a winter’s worth of tube tomatoes from Safeway.

Both my great-grandfather and grandfather were famous for the macho tomatoes they grew. Pounders. Two-pounders. Chicken manure was my grandfather’s secret fertilizer. His juicy red giants at once held sweetness and tartness in perfect balance. Their rich, moist slices could cover most of a Sunday dinner plate and crowd out the mashed potatoes and gravy, the fried chicken and English peas. At ham sandwich time, their crimson succulence hung out beyond the four corners of the bread.

Very early in life, however, I learned that my favorite way to eat tomatoes is in the same manner that many people like to eat apples: whole, unpeeled and sprinkled between bites with a few crystals from a bright blue box of Morton salt. If you grew up in Dixie, you know that it is utterly déclassé to walk around with food in one hand and a dainty little salt shaker in the other. Yet it is perfectly okay – in fact, it is thoroughly manful – to lug around a big apple or tomato and a 26-ounce container of salt.

Tomatoes sent my father to college and away from farming. But he is still a master of backyard plots. I, however, grew up entirely in the city, with no feel at all for the land, for Sevin dust, for the delicate yellow blossoms on the tall, green vines. And until I married and turned my own soil, I was the black tomato, the rotten sheep, of the family.

Here, so far, are the highlights of my career as a grower of macho suburban tomatoes:

Year One – Technically, there is no year one. The week before I am to move into my first house and till my first garden, mysterious plant thieves steal all the potted vines from the patio of my Northwest Highway apartment. The vines’ replacements, planted in late June, dropped their blossoms in August and die miserably in an early frost.

Year Two – One incredibly succulent golf ball-sized tomato, only slightly holed by insects. Then the 10 vines bake to a golden brown in the Great Dallas Heat Wave of 1980 and are finished off by a plague of grasshoppers straight out of Days of Heaven. One hopeful sign: A lucky toad takes up residence in one corner of the garden.

Year Three – A bountiful crop, row upon row of big, firm, unblemished green tomatoes. Smashed off the vines and pum-meled to smithereens in the Great Dallas Hailstorm of 1981. The storm’s only survivor: the lucky toad. It feasts daily upon the insects that descend on the carnage, and, that fall, goes into hibernation fat and happy.

This year, determined to have a macho harvest, I broke ground early and worked it over not only with fertilizer but also with the germs of Dallas’ leading social disease: positive thinking. I raked so much positive thinking into the rows of tomatoes that I fully expected to see Zig Ziglar leaping ap-provingly to the top of the garden fence and gesturing toward heaven with a green thumb.

It was time at last for the planting. Out came the requisite tools of the gentleman suburban gardner: Sears hoe, Sears rake, Sears shovel, K Mart pitchfork. And deft was the first stab of the dirt. I turned over the clods and paused to admire the strat-ums of mysteries within the good earth.

The second stab unearthed an ugly white cutworm, the young tomato’s mortal enemy. One violent squish vanquished the foe.

Swinging now into my work rhythm and whistling Dig A Little Deeper by the Oak Ridge Boys, I added extra muscle to the pitchtork’s third plunge. Something wiggled beneath the dirt as I drew out the tines. On the second prong from the left, gigged through the gut, the lucky toad gave four feeble kicks and died with a sickening ooze.

Surely somewhere it is written that killing a garden’s lucky toad is, at the very least, 30 years-to-life of bad luck. If so, the curse is cast, and only 27 years remain on the mortgage.

I give up. Not even Zig Ziglar can saveme now. See you at the Farmer’s Market.You’ll know me. I’ll be the tough guy, themacho one swaggering from stall to stall,hefting every tomato with hard, suspiciouseyes and babbling incessantly, “Are yousure, are you sure, are you sure these arehome-grown?”