This is it!  I had pepper plants as well, but they’ve all been snapped up.  Now it’s time for the tomato plants to go in the ground, since they won’t fit in my cold frame any more and this week’s weather forecast is calling for sunny weather and highs in the 80s by the end of this week.  I’ve got healthy, 2-3′ plants, all of which are flowering already and many of which have started to set fruit, and I’m only asking $3 per plant.  After this week, any lefovers will just end up in the compost pile.  Here are the four varieties I’ve grown this year:

Sun Gold: a hybrid cherry tomato.  Early in the season, these fruits don’t make it into the house, as we just eat them out of hand; by mid-summer it produces so many tomatoes that we eat them with everything: salads, fresh pasta, seafood.  Small apricot-colored fruits are intensely sweet, with great flavor, and refreshing acidity.  Their only drawback is that the fruits split readily after a good soaking, so you just need to get out there and harvest them when there’s rain in the forecast.

Green Zebra: this is the green tomato to eat.  Green with dark green stripes, it just blushes yellow when it’s ready to eat.  Unlike an unripe, “green” tomato, these have plenty of sweet, rich flavor, and the dense texture of a kiwi.  Fruits hold up well under all kinds of conditions and don’t crack.  If you have a problem with people helping themselves to your tomatoes, these are a great variety to grow, as they won’t ever look ripe enough for anyone else to pick!

Cherokee Purple: an heirloom variety from Tennessee, said to have originated with the Cherokee indians.  Produces good size fruits, over half a pound, with a dusky, brownish-purple skin and brick-red flesh inside.  The sweet, rich, juicy flavor has been compared to Brandywine–or even to red wine!–and most people who have tried it rank this variety in their top 5 for tomato flavor.

Pruden’s Purple: another heirloom tomato.  Here’s the description from the Fedco catalog: “Vigorous potato-leaf vines yield spreading irregular pink 1 lb. fruit with very few seeds, a silken texture and rich tomato taste, nicely tart with a balanced undertone of sweetness that is neither insipid nor cloying.”  Ripens weeks earlier than Brandywine and makes a great sandwich tomato.

Two recent, random events:

A couple weeks ago, a good friend told me, “If it weren’t for our friendship, I’d probably be locked away in a mental institution now.”

And just last week, I ate my first salad from my own garden: chives, kale, spinach, chard, mustard greens, and at least a dozen kinds of lettuce. The first salad of the year is a private, almost sacramental event; I don’t share it with anyone. It’s a moment when I stop to recognize my own small working in the greening of the earth again, gather it for a meal, savor it, and make it part of my own flesh.

I’m not sure what, if anything connects these two events, except my own, mixed-up mind.

Although you probably don’t need me to tell you, growing your own salad is wildly impractical, not to say a little crazy. Although the garden beds are already there, edged in brick and bordered with flourishings hedgerows of chives, getting them ready every year means digging in wheelbarrow-loads of compost. The seeds for the plants that I enjoyed in my salad were sown as far back as February, raised under lights in my basement, then potted up and moved out to the cold frame, and finally put in the ground weeks ago. All so that I could go out in the rain, harvest a few individual leaves, wash them, spin them, dress them, and enjoy a salad for my lunch. Crazy.

Maybe we need small acts of craziness like this to keep us sane. Love, friendship, raising our children, being neighborly, do nothing to contribute to the GNP, do not add up in dollars and cents, but without them, we’d all need to be locked away. Without a connection to the earth, to each other, all that’s left is the insanity of our waking world of “buying and getting,” blind warring and striving. And so we go a little wild and do things that do not compute: make time to grow a garden, have a drink with a friend, and remember that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Whew, it’s been a busy week. Came back from England to see snow on the ground as we flew over Illinois (Sam just pulled his hat down over his eyes and refused to look), but fortunately the spinach that I set out before we left had established itself enough to survive the cold weather. I’ve got the first of the salad greens coming up, planted my peas before the rains this week, and potted up my first batch of seedlings. In another three weeks, these diminutive seedlings will be well-established plants, the danger of frost should be past, and it will be time to set them in the ground and sell off the ones I can’t fit in (and believe me, there will be plenty).

For sale, I’ll have a few herbs–cilantro and fernleaf dill–as well as cold-hardy greens, such as Bright Lights chard, Osaka purple mustard greens, purple peacock broccoli, Tuscan kale, and Falstaff brussel sprouts. This will also be the time to see and reserve plants that won’t be ready to go into the ground until the end of May: heat-loving herbs, such as Thai basil, lime basil, lemon basil, and, of course, Genovese basil; four kinds of tomato: Sun Gold cherry, Cherokee purple, Pruden’s purple, and Green Zebra; three kinds of hot peppers: Thai hot (a scorching 80,000 Scoville units), Fish (a beautiful and unique variety of serrano chili), and Czech Black (a little less heat than jalapeños).

Sale will start late morning and end around mid-afternoon (gotta leave time to get to the wine tasting!). First come, first served. Plants are $1.75 each, which includes a 25¢ deposit on the pot. So, mark your calendar! You can pick up your April order from This Little Piggy and get rooting in your garden at the same time.