In bad years, well, most of them have been, lately. The black walnut on the other side of the yard has spawned a bumper crop of squirrels. (When they finish gnawing a tomato, they resharpen their teeth on the trash-can lids.)
And the tall, leafy zelkova we planted for shade? It has done its job in spades: It now casts a good four-fifths of the garden in funereal shadow.
At a recent heirloom tomato festival at Terrain, the garden center in Glen Mills, similar tales of woe were exchanged - sagas of how rain and spores collaborated to ruin harvests.
Adding certain irony to the injury was this wrinkle: Armchair gardeners heeding the trumpet call from the White House to plant patches of their own unwittingly abetted the spread of blight by buying record numbers of infected seedlings from big-box stores.
The Victory Garden as terrorist training camp!
At the Fair Food Farmstand in the Reading Terminal Market, the usual midsummer tsunami from local fields just didn't materialize. Instead of having to turn farmers away, the stand got barely enough heritage tomatoes to stock the shelves.
I called grower Tim Stark up in Berks County - he farms 58 sweet acres between Lobachsville and New Jerusalem - to see how his season had been going.
Stark is alternately a "celebrity farmer" or "tomato guru," depending on the review of his charmingly intimate new book, Heirloom: Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer (Broadway Books, $14 paperback).
Well, he said, it has been an oddly mixed bag. On the one hand, his crews picked more tomatoes (he has 100 varieties, and planted five extra acres this year) than in any August in the 15 years he has been growing; that would be six, seven, up to 10 tons a week.
