MILLIANS: Gardens a comfort in trying times | Opinion – The Union-Recorder

We say "tomayto." Others might say "tomahto."

I say let's get our tomatoes in the ground.

If there's anything the coronavirus pandemic has done, it's brought us back to our roots.

I wasn't around during the Great Depression, but in talking to people who were, there was one golden rule: What you had to eat was what you could grow.

With the empty shelves at grocery stores nowadays, people are going back to the earth and planting their own gardens.

Joe Duckworth at Duckworth Farm Supply says tomato and other vegetable plants are flying off the shelves faster than he can get them in.

We had to ask Joe to set aside a dozen or so "Better Boy" tomato plants for us. We picked them up Friday morning.

According to tomatodirt.com, the most popular tomato hybrid varieties are Better Boy, Big Beef, Big Boy, Celebrity and Early Girl. There are thousands of varieties.

And that's not even mentioning cherry, grape and Roma (aka plum) tomatoes.

My dad and I are in our annual race with my son Kyle in South Carolina to see who can produce the first harvest of tomatoes. Kyle has had tomato plants in the ground for several weeks. He plants the seeds and raises them indoors until it's warm enough to transplant them to the outdoors.

Experts say now is the perfect time to plant tomatoes because they can get at least six hours of sun a day.

My dad has had a garden for as long as I can remember. He and his buddy, the late Randolph Puckett, even had two gardens for several years.

In addition to tomatoes, they grew pole beans (Kentucky Wonder), bunch beans, butter beans, field peas, corn (Silver Queen), sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, squash, beets, onions, carrots, watermelons, cucumbers and cantaloupes.

They must have supplied half of Milledgeville with vegetables.

Now, Randy Dalrymple is kind enough to let us put in a small garden on his property. We share the bounty.

Basically, we do the labor. Randy is the brains of the operation.

We did have a rototiller to break up the dirt, but it broke down last year. We don't know what happened to it, but we're blaming Randy. So we wound up renting one.

This year, Randy has borrowed a tiller from his friend, Rye Ramsey. We'll try not to break it.

We're pretty much down to corn and tomatoes, with maybe a few watermelons (Charleston Grays), cantaloupes, cucumbers and pumpkins.

So the race is on. The bad thing about gardens is you have to wait a long time to taste the fruits of your labor.

But once you slice that first, fresh, garden-grown tomato and pile it on top of bread, bacon, lettuce and mayo, the wait's worth it.

Let the anticipation begin.

Rick Millians, a 1970 Baldwin graduate who worked at newspapers in Georgia, Ohio and South Carolina before retiring, can be reached at 803-331-4290 or rdmillians@aol.com.

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MILLIANS: Gardens a comfort in trying times | Opinion - The Union-Recorder