Missing In Action -- The Tomatoes And Morning Glories Have It Out - - Steve Johnston

A COUPLE OF MAYS AGO, I decided to plant tomatoes in a little flat piece of land I managed to win back from the morning glories.

It seems like May is the time of year when you want to crawl around in your backyard like some kind of dog, scratch at the earth and plant something. I wanted to plant tomatoes.

I don't want to give away any gardening secrets, but you can purchase tomato plants that are almost all grown up from the neighborhood hardware store. You can get jumbo tomato plants that come in their own junior garbage cans.

I bought the jumbo plants because I figured I needed a jump on getting these things going. Each one cost $1.69 and I purchased six of them. To give you an idea how they would look after they became all grown up, the junior garbage cans had pictures of the tomatoes plants pasted on the sides.

The plants were as tall as a tree and the tomatoes were the size of bowling balls.

The clerk told me that maybe I would like some kind of wire frame to hold up the plants. When tomatoes get to be the size of bowling balls, I was told, the plants fall over. I bought six of them at $1.99 each for the flat spot where I cleared out the morning glories.

The clerk said I also needed tomato plant food, some slug bait and a little tool that looked like the center part of a toilet paper roll, but with a handle on one end. You use this to dig a hole to put the tomato plant in, the clerk said. The food, slug bait and

toilet-paper thing came to $12. Add in the rest of the stuff, and the bill came to over $33, or a little over five bucks per tomato plant.

It's a funny thing about tomato plants. They may look like little trees, but when they fall over in the trunk of your car while bringing them home from the hardware store, their little arms break in half.

So when I arrived back home with my six tomato plants in their junior garbage cans, they had been reduced to four healthy ones and two wounded in action. I figured even with half of the limbs left, I would still have enough tomatoes to supply the Johnstons with BLTs for the year.

After I planted the tomatoes in my scratched-out piece of hardpan and put the wire cages around them, I figured I did my part. But Mrs. Johnston, who figures she knows everything, said my work had just begun. According to her, it requires more than planting tomatoes to get a crop the size of bowling balls.

"You are going to have to weed and water them," the Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston said with that tone people who actually plant things use to talk with the rest of us.

As it turned out, I didn't have to do any of that weeding and watering stuff. It was a typical Seattle May. I planted in the hot sunshine and the next day it rained. It rained through the week and then the sun came out for a day and then it rained again and then the sun came out. Every time I started to think about looking in on my tomato plants, it started to rain.

Finally, I was able to get out to the garden. Anyone who has lived in the Northwest for more than a year knows what happens when it rains and then the sun comes out and then it rains and so on. Morning glories (or better known by their Latin name: Plantus From Hell) spring up.

The morning glory vines had wrapped themselves around the necks of the tomato plants that weren't killed in the car ride home and strangled them. The amazing thing about this is that Mrs. Johnston never said "I told you so" once.

I got one tomato out of the six plants. It was the size of a golf ball and cost $33. Or $400 a pound.

Last winter, a 5-pound bag of potatoes went bad under the kitchen sink and I was going to throw it out. Instead I cut some spuds in half and put them in the holes where I had pulled out the tomato plants. I forgot about the potatoes until end of summer when Mrs. Johnston said it looked like I had a crop.

We had them for dinner that night. Couple of days later, I dug up some more and made potato salad. There was no cost.

This should make me happy, but the other day I went to check on the garden for spring planting and the potato plants were starting to grow again. Next to them the morning glories were growing. They seemed to be getting along.

But I think I heard them laughing.

Steve Johnston is a reporter for The Seattle Times.