Despite bad weather and a pesky raccoon, Margaret Edwards somehow grew a 2 pound, 1.2 ounce tomato in the garden at her Carroll County home.
The fruit was large enough to make Edwards, who lives in the Gravel Hill Community, the 2004 winner of the Commonwealth's Fat Tomato Contest.
Edwards' tomato was the only one that weighed more than 2 pounds, and she was one of only four people who entered.
She said she is not sure about the variety because she plants so many every year, and they were not marked.
In order to give their tomato plants the support they need to grow, Edwards' husband, Jimmy, builds cages from concrete wire to go over the vines. Then, at each end of the two rows and at intervals along the rows, he puts up posts and runs a smooth wire across the top. The concrete wire cages are attached to the smooth wire to hold them in place.
"It keeps them from being blown over by the wind," Edwards said.
Also, as the vines grow out, she pushes them back through the cages to keep them supported.
Edwards said the weather was no help in her effort to grow the prize winner.
"When we had about 14 days of rain, I had some of the prettiest tomatoes I've ever grown. But they were laying on top of each other, and I had to go down through there and throw them off because they were rotting," she said.
Edwards says she is still not sure how that one survived.
The critters also tried to hinder her tomato crop.
"Where we live, we have a lot of raccoons, armadillos, foxes, wild turkeys and deer, and they like to get in the garden and eat the cantaloupes, watermelons and tomatoes," she said.
"I wouldn't tell my husband, but I kept watching that tomato and hoping that thing wouldn't eat it because I knew if any tomato was going to win that one was," Edwards said.
"The night after I pulled it and brought it up here (to the Commonwealth), a raccoon got in there and ate my tomatoes. I would have been sick if he had ate that," she said.
Edwards still isn't sure how she grew such a fine tomato. "We were later getting the garden in than we usually do. That may have helped."
But the June rain caused a lot of diseases with the tomatoes, she said.
"We don't like to put out poison, but I do put out DiPel to get rid of tomato worms," Edwards said.
Andy Braswell, county director of Extension, agrees with Edwards' assessment about the bad tomato year.
"We didn't have the weather to produce a good tomato crop this year," he said.
June was unseasonably wet, causing numerous diseases among most of the area's tomato plants, he said.
"They didn't produce like they ordinarily would," Braswell said.
Fungus disease and wilt hit most of the area's crops, he said.
The leaves would start curling up and dying, cutting off nutrients to the tomatoes. Disease also would cause the tomatoes to look splotchy red and yellow.
The best thing to do when plants become diseased is pull them up and try to keep it from spreading to the other plants, Braswell said.
"But by the time you catch it on one, the other plants would already be infected," he said.
Braswell said most tomato growers he deals with in Leflore County are home gardeners. There aren't many commercial growers in this area, he said.
But when the problems with weather and disease hit the 2004 crop, he received a lot of calls. "I looked at a bunch of tomato plants this year," he said.
Braswell said neighboring Arkansas had such a bad tomato year that the state more or less abandoned its crop.
Edwards and her husband enjoyed the prize-winning tomato by making a sandwich. She said it was so big that one slice went over the edge of the rye bread they used. "It had a real good flavor to it."
The Edwardses like to raise a garden because they want to know what they are eating.
"I can pick it and take it to the house and put it up in a short time," she said.
Some of her favorite ways to use tomatoes are for soup, sandwiches, stewed okra and tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, taco sauce, pizza sauce, chili and vegetable soup.
"Tomatoes are such a versatile vegetable. You can do so much with them," she said. "The list goes on and on."
