Failure in the Garden: Damn You, Tomatoes.

I know what you’re thinking. This is a metaphor. It’s a meditation about the world, and it’s inevitable disappointments. It’s about life, the universe, dealing with defeat.

Nope. It’s about My Actual Garden, the patch of land in the back of the house and the little strip next to the driveway. I love to garden, and my summer planting is finished , but I can already glimpse the basic lineaments of failure. In case you can see your own version of the same, I want to assure you that this is a summertime commonplace. It’s not some poetic journey or philosophical conceit, but the failure-to-thrive of actual plants. If there’s a lesson here, it’s to keep trying your best. A bucket of monarda at $12.95 is a small price to pay for the pleasures of my garden.

But I am truly sick of my annual tomatocalypse. Like really, utterly bloody and beaten. I start each summer with the New York Times food section. This is the year I get Hamptons tomatoes! I’ll harvest perfectly formed specimens from my heirloom plants and put them out on white china platters. Meryl Streep will come to my table, exclaim that my tomatoes are the best in the universe and tell us how she prepped for The Devil Wears Prada. My tomatoes will be the talk of Ina Garten’s test kitchen, and Martha will come by for a tiny taste. Finally, finally I will be famous for something, if only the excellence of my flawless Brandywines.

Instead, I get garbage, or nothing at all. Last year it was a handful of pitiful hybrids after my first crop of heirlooms melted in the sun. Each fruit was half eaten by my herd of squirrels, leaving me to imagine the microbes in their saliva. This year, we went on vacation in July with one lonely fruit barely attached to its vine. By the time we returned, it had disappeared. I didn’t even get a slick of squirrel drool. For the record, I arranged to have each plant hand watered, at a likely cost of $25 per pot. At that rate, I could have saved my dollars, flown to the Hamptons, and invited Martha for lunch. I forgot to mention that I always plant my tomatoes in pots. God forbid they should make contact with the indignity of mere dirt.

And that’s my story, year after year. I’ve just torn out the rest of my plants, disgusted with tomatoes, the weather in Oklahoma, and the evident failure of my exhaustive research. What’s the best tomatoe for a Zone 7 garden with stretches of unbearable, punishing heat? Instead of giving you the right answer—Don’t do it!—Siri invents some crap about good prospects for my garden. I’ll either buy what she says or rely on my good friend, Brian, who shares my same fetishistic commitment to tomatoes. And this time next year, we will both trash our plants, having learned again about the futility of hope. OK, tomatoes are a metaphor after all. I just don’t like what they say about my life.

Did you plant this year? Did your tomatoes work? What the hell am I doing wrong?