In Iowa: Tomatoes by the flat-load

While Cedar Rapidians have been endowed by proclamation with extra time to enjoy summer, fall, winter and spring, many Iowans, including many residents of Cedar Rapids, make time to enjoy the state's real fifth season - the too brief but bountiful interlude in which homegrown tomatoes and sweet corn grace nearly every dining table.

From late July through late September, easily and economically obtainable fresh sweet corn and tomatoes can put you two-thirds of the way to a meal as good as the rich folk are eating.

Like the morel mushroom, their seasonal availability and lack of a suitable substitute enhance their inherent goodness.

When winter comes around, feel free to buy those hard, pink tomatoes strip-mined in Chile and the starchy shrink-wrapped ears more suitable for pig feed than human consumption. I am waiting for the middle of July, when I can walk out to the garden and get the good stuff.

If you like to source your garden produce locally - and know for sure exactly how it was raised - you can't get more local than your own garden.

If you have the space, I recommend that you take advantage of Iowa's ideally suited soil and climate and raise your own - a practice that pays additional dividends in convenience, satisfaction and economy (unless you compute your time as labor, rather than recreation, as I do).

If you can't or won't grow your own, corn and tomatoes are readily available at farmers markets, roadside stands, grocery stores and even, in the case of sweet corn, at festivals like the one continuing today at St. Jude Catholic Church in Cedar Rapids.

I typically plant three sweet corn varieties, each two weeks apart, so that - in theory at least, and in practice this year - I will have an unbroken, six-week succession of fresh corn.

I get odd looks when I mention to fans of steamed or roasted ears that I prefer mine uncooked. But with today's sugary enhanced cultivars, bred for maximum sweetness and tenderness, the skin pop and flavor burst are never better than uncooked, fresh out of the patch, first thing on a cool August morning.

The standard measure of tomatoes, in my neck of the woods, is not the bushel or the peck. It is the beer flat, the 11-by-16-inch cardboard container in which breweries ship four six packs of beer.

The sturdy, easy-to-come-by beer flat will hold a dozen of the finest Burpee's Big Boy specimens and from 15 to 16 of Burpee's Celebrity, which, because of its reliability and high percentage of perfect fruit, has become my default hybrid.

Last year I picked 190 flats from 72 tomato plants before I stopped counting.

Why 72 plants? Certainly I cannot eat or preserve 190 beer flats of tomatoes, although I do expect to fill 100 quart jars with salsa and tomato juice this summer and I do expect to continue eating tomatoes with almost every meal and between some of them.

I went big 27 years ago when I volunteered to provide tomatoes for the Quasqueton Area Historical Society's inaugural fish fry fundraiser. To have 10 beer flats of perfect tomatoes by the next-to-last weekend in August, I needed lots of plants, and I have never been troubled by subsequent surpluses.

Unlike the prolific zucchini - which each July forced Lake Wobegone residents to lock their cars in the church parking lot, according to humorist Garrison Keillor - I have found that it is not hard to give away perfect tomatoes.