It looked a bit like Dr. Suess had planted our tomatoes. They portruded from the ground at an odd angle, somewhere just north of 45°, which is an unfortunate angle where tomatoes are concerned. You want them straight, orderly for the trellises that will come to hold them up. And you want them deep, shooting roots far into the ground to gather minerals that will lend them flavor on the plate.

Ours were neither straight nor deep. And for that, as is so often true in farming, you could blame the weather. It was early June, but spring had come a month behind schedule. The tomatoes, awaiting transplant, shivered when the slightest spring breeze swept through the hoophouse. To thrive, tomato seedlings prefer a soil temperature of at least 60° when planted. Down a few inches in our garden, things were much cooler than that.

The only match for spiteful weather is a resourceful farmer, and ours, resourceful as he was, devised a plan that Dr. Suess would surely have enjoyed. We would plant our tomatoes sideways, he decided, burying them just enough for the roots to take hold, but not so much as to subject them to the chilly soil below. The stem would curve artfully up toward the sun, its strange angle barely detectable to the untrained eye. (Thanks to the steady stream of B&B guests who wander over to admire the garden, our property is replete with eyes like these).  Most importantly, we would get our huge tomato seedlings in the ground before they simply burst from their current pots, an event that–to the remotely trained eye–did not seem too farfetched.

And so we did it. We finished the job, heaping an inch or two of soil atop our tomato roots, convinced that such scant cover would keep them warm, and we didn’t consider the issue for the rest of the week. Certainly, we thought, that was the last time we’d see the roots of our tomatoes.

It wasn’t. On Saturday evening, as we were lounging around in the yurt enjoying a post-work beverage, the boss poked her head in the door. “Uh, I’m gonna ask you guys to give us a quick hand here…” she paused, ominously. “We have to replant all those tomatoes you guys put in.” We stared at her. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “They were too shallow,” she said. “They’re drying out, and we don’t want to lose them.” “Shit!” I said. We have tickets to a concert tonight that starts in a half-hour!” Whatever was wrong, I thought,  could be resolved in the morning, right? “Can you give us 15 minutes?” she asked. This was serious. Exchanging a wide-eyed glance, we rose to head out to the field.

We were stooped in the garden, shoving the tomatoes deeper into the soil, when our friends arrived to pick us up for the concert that night. They were well dressed, with the beers they had brought clinking in their jackets, but their faces grew confused when they saw that we were still in the garden. “Just go,” said the farmer, as our friends approached. “We’ve got this.” Feeling a surge of guilt, I looked around. They were more than halfway done. And returning to work had been a rather rude shock–it was Saturday night, a time to unwind. We had already worked a hard day.

So we went. But driving off I couldn’t shake a nagging thought­: If we had owned the place, if those were our tomatoes, if we didn’t just work here…there would have been no concert tonight. I recalled the words that a particularly cranky boss had yelled to me the year before, as I stood watering his plants. “Farming isn’t like college!” he had yelled. “You can’t just phone it in!” If I ever own a farm, the farm won’t extend me the courtesy of holding all its urgent needs until the morning hours, when I’m rested, coffeed up, and ready to tackle them anew. It’ll throw things at me in rainstorms, the dead of winter, the middle of the night. Right when all my friends, as it happens, are at a concert, enjoying themselves. And what will I get in return? All I can really hope for, I suppose, is some goddamn tomatoes that don’t die.