Author: Emma K. Leadley
Karl twitched in his sleep. He dreamed of tomatoes. Fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes with their firm texture, sweet innards and tantalising smell. He twisted one from its stem and bit into it, juice and seeds running down his chin and–
The hub lights came on, his alarm beeping.
“Dammit, just when it was getting good,” he grumbled, rubbing his eyes and stretching. Morning ablutions done and suited up, he entered the mess area and nodded to his colleagues. Grabbing a coffee with its stale, recycled-water taste, he thought back to the tomatoes again, mouth watering.
Moving on to the biodome he looked over the growth data. The legumes were fine; they were growing up their supports, albeit slower than calculations predicted. The alliums had overtaken their growth curve. Fresh garlic proved a hit with the crew. But the nightshades were more difficult. The last crop of potatoes had grown but reached a size limit beyond which nothing could coax them to expand. Everyone compared eating them to chewing on cardboard, worse than the ration packs. They weren’t enough to sustain the calorie requirements of a hungry crew, let alone keep them happy with texture and taste. At least the chilli peppers weren’t looking too bad.
He’d dropped the idea of eggplants; they weren’t calorie dense enough for the space they took to grow. But the tomatoes should have been easy. Only he couldn’t even get them to flower, let alone grow their fruit. He thought back to his last meal on Earth. The whole family crammed round the table, heaped spaghetti bolognese onto their plates and shouting over each other, as ever. Light years away now. He took off his glasses and wiped the tears from his eyes. Semi-blinded, he knocked his coffee mug onto a batch of tomato seedlings.
Two months later, they started flowering.
You say tow-MAY-tow, I say tow-Maht-tow… But you said it so much better. Simple and elegant. Nice job.
Karl did on accident what I like to do with bad coffee. Those really taste like plant food.
That was fun. Told with a gentle pedestrianism that suited the piece.
Yes, tomatoes should be easy to grow; they come up like weeds in my veg plot, because the seeds from any tomatoes thrown in my compost bin happily survive the process. (They also survive the human gut; sewage works in summer usually have large accidental crops!).
Ripening them before the cold kills them can be a problem here if you don’t have a greenhouse, but should be easy in space if you have temperature control and enough energy for good growlights.
So I wonder why the nightshades posed a problem, (potatoes and tomatoes are related to each other – and to deadly nightshade). Perhaps the ship’s plant growing medium was missing some trace element that the coffee supplied.
Everything goes better with coffee!