This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
~ Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.
Notes: Photo – Katharine Hanna with Organic vine-ripened tomatoes. Poem – A Year of Being Here
Live & Learn 
After growing up in NJ and raising massive Beefsteaks each year, I refuse to eat what passes for tomatoes these days. There was something about the soil… I have had little luck in SC growing good tomatoes 🍅
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Agree with you Ray.
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deliciously done
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So bright and beautiful but no local tomatoes here except from Mexico 🇲🇽
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Yep. Here too.
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Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
How true this is!! Garden grown!! … Blessing the day! … ‘ Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.’
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Can’t wait for the garden to start growing things again.
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I bet.
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We have a series of gardens on rooftops that sell hothouse veggies year-round. I still find them rather drab. Plants need the warmth of the sun, the challenge of the wind, the fight to survive to bring out all their magnificence! (In my humble opinion, of course)
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Lucky you!
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Honestly, while a wonderful option, it is terribly expensive.
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Have *never* found anything better than the heirloom tomatoes eaten straight out of my grandmother’s patch, skins warmed by the sun, juices bursting in your mouth and pouring down your chin. Happy childhood memory revisited….
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Does she grown the green ones, sometimes called alligator? In NJ, they seem to be the most extravagantly flavorful heirloom…gee, I’m fantasizing about tomatoes in August!
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No, Valerie, these were big, red Beefsteak tomatoes…as sweet as you could imagine. If I close my eyes, I can still smell them and feel their soft, fuzzy surface against my cheek….
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David, this is becoming a tomato porn blog…
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Laughing. And free of STDs!
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😂😂
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The only tomatoes that taste good this time of year in my part of the world are grape or cherry tomatoes…2018 -the garden held 48 tomato plants, 2019 we grew over 70 tomato plants, many tomato, pepper & squash seeds are saved yearly…we have kale, leeks, carrots, bok choy and some herbs that overwintered…he started the peas around the 2nd of Feb along with broccoli and onion seeds with heat pads underneath the trays, in the tiny greenhouse…oh, btw pints of Talenti are part of Friday’s special 2 for $5…I plan on going to the store if I’m not up for it he will go…he was going to buy some Island Van ice cream today I said nope, save some money and wait until tomorrow Talenti is on sale…he did bring home my favorite salted dark chocolate caramels! I ate two…
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Agree on Cherry tomatoes this time of your. Talenti, yes!
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