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August 04, 2004
Tickling the eventual winners. The large tomato began to grow a bit of a penicillinesque culture in the place where it used to be attached to its plant. It also leaked some sort of yellowish liquid; I did not want to try out what it might be. One of the pots contained a whole variety of seeds in its soil already, and so it seemed like the perfect burial ground for the expired red fruit. I used some of those single use chopsticks to dig a hole into the center of the patch of soil. I dug by sticking the wood into the center and then spinning it around a few times. It eventually looked like a pot filled with funnel of soil. I placed the tomato over this hole in the ground. The fruit was far too large for even this opening. And so I pressed it with the chopsticks. This is when the tomato burst. It became two very wet halves spilling liquid and seeds all over the patch of soil. I tried to push the halves again, but they were also very soft and fragile. It took just a few seconds and I was looking at some sort of combination of edible red fruit-flesh, mixed with very black potting mix. It was a very odd combination. I was not really wasting food here, this was a moment of enriching the soil, of giving back to the soil. The tomato seeds just came with their first watering included. I began to stir the mix. It took maybe a minute or so for the tomato completely become part of the now very wet content of the pot. Even the sounds produced here were of a pleasant and soft nature. I was changing the proportions of a tiny living part of the universe. This morning the soil was still wet, covered completely with what almost looked like a layer of perfectly white snow. The mold cultures are of course the first result of the burial of an overly ripe tomato. A continued mixing of the ever drying soil is going to soon move us beyond this stage, at least on the surface of things. I am allergic to mold, btw, and this kind of mold is not the kind that seems to irritate me in any way. It was more of a soft and completely white kind. Almost as if the soil were impregnated with a camembert. I feel like an antibiotic gardener... selecting which life forms will be allowed and which will be not. It is all a game in which I am just teasing the eventual winners. I hope that one day some part of me is going to make a fertile ground for some yet to be born kid's gardening experiments.