[nctomatoman]

My quickie diary of the day - now that I've had some sleep (a very deep one....midnight to 8 AM), some good coffee, a blueberry apple Dutch baby and a run thru the NY Times Crossword (about 15% filled in)....

So, up early yesterday morning - start preparations at 7:30 AM, loading the tables into the truck, laying the tomatoes into 8 newspaper lined plastic mesh trays, transplanted some of the second round Dwarfs to bring for Lee and Tim, and Sue and I were off at 9:30.

Once we left highway 40 via the Efland exit, we knew that we were in for a treat - from highway to idyllic countryside, rolling fields, just the kind of venue that would be perfect. I was a steamy NC summer morning, already into the 80s - we arrived at Jimmy and Fred's house to find Lee setting up tables. What a setting - there was a wooden stage for the clogging, the surroundings well described by Morgan - and a spacious area under a large tree for setting up the tables.

After a quick strategy session, we settled on the locations - where to lay out the tomaotes, the dwarf project, name tag table, food tables. It took a good two hours to set out the tomatoes - Lee had the tomato ID tags all printed out. While we set up, it clouded over, and a distant thunderstorm sent refreshing breezes our way (which of course flapped our table cloths and sent plates and tomato tags flying!). With some distant rumbles of thunder, we had the combination of possible unwanted rain with the cooling, refreshing impact of the breeze....Lee started his photodocumentation...

Once set up, and after a quick wander through the superb gardens, people started arriving - Rena, then familiar faces from my seedlings sales, then Suze, Morgan and Craig - it was 1:30 and appeared that we may not be all that well attended or tomato-ed. But by 2 PM we were approaching 70 people, Lee and I introduced the event - and we armed ourselves with knives, took tables and started slicing, eating and talking....I manned the dwarf table, and with help from Rena and Suze, started working our way down with the real hard core tomatophiles who tasted and commented on everything. The main comment that really impressed me was from Jim - that we were running a project with no intervention from companies, government, etc- no thought of profit. We looked at that table of a rainbow of colors and sizes and recognized that some of these beauties would, in a few years, be in people's gardens. Very cool! And many of them were very positively received by the tasters. Patrina and Grubs will be less happy with the discipline of tasting and notes...but it was pure tomatoey chaos by that point, and all good!

I never did make it to the other tables. My wife Sue sliced at one, Lee at another - we had a great collection/selection, the tomatoes were pretty uniformly in great condition - there were some incorrect varieties and oddities (a NOT Opalka was the first I noted, as well as a NOT Aker's West Virginia - and Rock Angier produced a very odd green toned Dr Wyche's Yellow!). As people tasted, the food table got busy - there were salsas, salads, soups, white bread was getting slathered with Mayo and turned into BLTs - music started playing, the sun was out. It becomes all a blur after while.

And great conversations - getting to know Rena, Suze, Craig, Morgan were definitely a highlight of the day. We have a very special collection of people here at Tomatoville, united by a love of tomatoes of course, but it transcends that. There was a spirit that permeated the day - it lifted one up, the tomatoes became just symbol for a more grounded, natural way of life, perhaps something someone old fashioned - and this became more evident when the local musicians started playing and people started dancing. It is hard to describe, but my wife and I agreed that it was probably our best day of 2007. It was that good.

I have to give credit for this also to the incredible giving, open nature of Jimmy and Fred - they are very generous people, with their friendship, with allowing us to invade their little slice of heaven. Tomatopaloozas have all been successful, but we really raised the bar on this one. We are already talking about having it in Efland again next year.

What else? Still all a bit of a blur to me. We headed home at dusk - 9 PM, to our two dogs who acted as if they hadn't seen us in 5 years! We took a long walk, we crashed. We have the pictures to remember the event, but really it will be the way that the day touched each one of us in very personal, specific ways.

Just tomatoes? Hah!