Big thinking vs. small

Our farm west of Edmond where we had the Pumpkin Patch and tomatoes

First off I have to tell you the picture has nothing to do with this story unless you can somehow tie growing tomatoes to catching trout.

One of the things that happens when you grow up in the country is you have time to think and think big.  Now it is not that I always wanted to grow tomatoes but if I were going to grow them I wanted to grow a bunch. That is what I did and here is the story.

 So after Shouna and I had been married about 15 years and Wynter, our daughter, was about 12 years old, Chase  was 9 and Preston was 6 we bought a farm northwest of Edmond.  I still worked full time in the data processing business but now I owned a farm so what was I going to do.

The first year we planted pumpkins and that is another story but the second year I decided to plant tomatoes. Everyone knows that home grown tomatoes are the best especially when you take cold fresh Big Boy tomatoes sliced and put on bread with mayonnaise plus some crisp bacon you have a sandwich to-die-for.  That is "good eat'n" as dad always said.

Well I planted over one acre of tomatoes.  Shouna wanted to know who was going to pick those tomatoes and who was going to purchase them since no one knew we had tomatoes.  I told her that "if you plant them they will come" and people would pick their own. There were a couple of problems here not counting my wife.  First I got too many tomatoes growing before folks knew we had them.  Second we had to pick them and we put them on our front porch for folks to get.  I would say we had about 300 to 500 lbs. of tomatoes on the front porch and very few buyers.  Have you ever smelled rotten tomatoes on your front porch?  Well that is where my wife became a problem.  She did not appreciate my tomatoes or the smell.  It got worse and worse but folks did start coming.

The next problem was that we found ourselves going out to take care of customers all the time and that was not worth it either.  The good news is we started letting folks pick their own or pick them off the porch and pay on the honor system.  I think our income off the tomatoes tripled at a minimum.  Now i will have  to tell you that three times not much is still not much as we still had hundreds of pounds of tomatoes to get rid of. Folks loved the tomatoes.

under construction in this pic but this is the house where the tomatoes were on the porch

Now I have to tell you that I really never gave much thought to making a lot of money on tomatoes but I loved planting them and seeing folks fight over our tomatoes.  It was a lot of fun.

OK, what do you learn in the Osage?

• It is not always about the money but the journey
• The value of a great tomato and bacon sandwich is incredible
• If you build it they will come

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com