These are the tomatoes I picked today. "What on earth is wrong with this woman?" you're probably wondering. "Why is she picking green tomatoes?!" I'm picking green tomatoes because all of the local gardens around here are rapidly becoming a lunar landscape.
My 83-year old neighbor recently wrote a desperate and moving letter to the local press and public authorities. The first sentence read: "Our valley is becoming a lunar landscape: wild boar and deer are destroying our fields." Neither animal is native to this area, but whereas the boar don't jump, and a simple fence can keep them away, you'd have to surround our whole valley with very tall fences in order to keep the deer out of its extensive gardens and orchards, which is virtually impossible. Deer devour the vegetables and eat the fruit off the trees, often breaking branches in the process. They even chew the bark off the olive trees, which kills the trees. What the deer don't eat, they stomp on and destroy. That's why I picked the tomatoes while they were still green ...
This morning, in fact, I found that during the night something big appeared to have fallen from the moon, right into my tomato plants. A deer had jumped the wild boar fence and grazed among my tomatoes, snapping off branches and knocking over the canes that hold the plants upright, and generally trampling everything in sight. Fortunately, the actual damage was fairly limited, but I decided not to risk another nocturnal visit, and picked some tomatoes to protect them from future destruction, even though they were still green. Instead of ripening in the sunshine on the vines, they'll ripen indoors in crates ... just like store-bought tomatoes. It's quite frustrating, but at least they'll get eaten by us, and not our horned neighbors.
I was upset, but Rebecca was thrilled. While we picked, she kept looking at me with a sneaky grin, saying over and over: "Green?!?" And I'd reply over and over that yes, just for today it was ok to pick green tomatoes (usually I have to remind her of just the opposite). Which made me even angrier at these leaping quadrupeds: didn't they know how important it was to be consistent when teaching a toddler?
Now, why couldn't the deer do their moonlight dance in the zucchini patch instead, which just keeps on producing and producing zucchini (long after we have any more desire to eat them, I must confess)?
