My Neighbor & Dr. Tallamy in My Summer Garden

[Dee & Frank Hughes]

This is a picture of a German Johnson heirloom tomato growing, well in my neighbors lawn for want of a better description. Now my neighbor is an avid vegetable gardener. We exchange plants and wisdom all the time. If I had to describe his gardening technique I'd say he's a Burpee man. A firm believer in bigger and better through the wonders of science. This spring he called me over to his yard to view a miracle. A little tomato plant was sprouting next to his fence. After some thought we determined that this was an offspring of the German Johnson I gave him last year. He had planted it in a container at that spot and it did what heirloom tomatoes do if you don't bother them. I convinced him to leave it there and "see what happens" and as you can see, tomatoes happened.
Now to add a touch of irony, my neighbor lost his entire crop of large, slicing tomatoes to bacterial wilt. This disease is carried in the soil; has no chemical cure and there are no immune tomato varieties on the market. So any hope my neighbor has of a juicy BLT this summer now resides on the pink shoulders of old German Johnson.
So what's this got to do with Dr. Doug Tallamy, the author of Bringing Nature Home? The theme of Dr. Tallamy's excellent speech in Charlotte last week was bio-diversity. While he didn't focus on food, the lesson applies just as well. We need to make room in our gardens for those old fashioned varieties that have no special engineering beyond that which God built in. When we do we get delightful surprises like the German Johnson sprouting from seed in our lawn. I dare Burpee's Better,More,Biggger Boy to try that.