Cracked skin

Cracked skin, a photo by Taproot Garden on Flickr.

You might think there would be a cream for this. Perhaps Estee Lauder or Lubriderm simply haven't thought about the horticultural prospects yet. I can tell them that are potential profits rotting out there in the garden. Cracked skin, as it turns out, isn't confined to faces and hands.

It has been a sobering disconcertion. All season long I have quietly tended, looking forward to an inundation of ripe tomatoes. From greenhouse seeding to garden weeding I have been present, watchful, and ready with the hose. The weather, after all, has been challenging. Everyone I meet commiserates pityingly over my misfortune of starting this new garden in this particular year -- what with the choking drought and the record setting heat. I usually reply that it might be good to start at the bottom. I might even believe it.

But now as the green orbs redden or orange, and I withhold my plucking hand for the perfect moment of ripeness, I discover upon closer inspection the chasmic wounds marring more of the harvest than seems fair.

Sure, there are plenty of beauties, and I treasure them. But there are all those others. To be sure, for many the marring is merely cosmetic, but in others the cracks have actually opened the flesh and baited the ants and their kin who have burrowed and gnawed and defamed.

It turns out -- and this really comes as no surprise -- it is likely my own fault. Sure, the high heat could be a factor according to one guide. But the likelier culprit is over-watering and under-fertilizing.

Ironic, I think, that my zealous ministrations with the hose might have been the undoing of a material percentage of the crop. That, while paying inadequate attention to basic nourishment.

Perhaps it is a little like an overprotective father, perpetually standing too close so as to deflect any potential harm, while providing little more than cotton candy for supper.

Well, I started this project in order to learn. Lesson #1: a little tough love can go a long way.