By Dennis Smith

I’m not certain that raising a patch of homegrown tomatoes could be considered a recreational outdoor pursuit in the same league as, say, deer hunting, but there are numerous undeniable similarities.

Success at either requires an abundance of species- and habitat-specific knowledge, an understanding of seasonal and daily weather nuances and their effects on the game at hand, and an accrued set of specialized skills acquired at the expense of many years of trial and error — not to mention preseason preparation, hard work, persistence and a healthy dose of good old-fashioned luck. Then, of course, the majority of work takes place outdoors; you have a small window of opportunity in a prescribed season in which to accomplish your task, and your best efforts are no guarantee of a successful harvest.

I speak from experience here — with both deer and tomatoes.

There are other similarities: While most hunters are generally content to bring home a small buck or doe, they almost invariably harbor a latent desire to bag a trophy buck or bull. Likewise, tomato gardeners are happy to see their plants bear fruit — any fruit — but they’re also always dreaming of the elusive, giant 3-pound beefsteak.

All of this occurred to me recently when Stan Andres and Don Burow, a couple of old-timers from Loveland, dropped in at the local hook-and-bullet store where I work to present me with packets of seeds from their cherished collections of carefully selected heirloom tomato plants along with some sage advice about how to best raise them.

“Start these babies indoors six to eight weeks before the ground is ready,” Stan said.

“A south-facing window is good for the seedlings, but overhead grow lights will keep them from getting too leggy,” Don advised.

On and on they went with myriad snippets of wisdom amassed over years and years of experience at growing their own luscious and monstrous tomatoes from scratch.

They gave me seeds and gardening counsel last year too, and while I managed to get a number of seedlings started successfully, I also killed about two-thirds of them by stupidly setting a covered tray of them out to bask in the sunlight on an unusually warm spring day. It fried them. I lost several more plants — and bushels of tomatoes — to the frost, admittedly the inevitable result of having waited too long to transplant the remaining seedlings. On the other hand, those that made it to fruition produced some of the most incredible tomatoes I’ve ever tasted, and one that weighed a remarkable 2-1/2 pounds.

I’ve been hunting deer for over 50 years now and have never bagged the mythical trophy buck, but I’ve come close to raising a trophy tomato after less than a decade of trying. None of which proves anything except maybe that it’s possible to succeed at some things in spite of yourself and to continually fail at others despite your best efforts. It also seems to teach that the satisfaction of doing a thing may lay more in the process than in the end result. Who’d have thought you could learn that from deer or tomatoes?