Notification of the sacrificial execution date was announced on the weather station shortly after the April page was officially bared on my drug store calendar.  It is an annual event, but the precise day and time is never annotated on that calendar.  Like Daylight Saving Time the day and time is apparently ciphered out by the Decider Department up in Washington D of C, and is tentatively set for April 12, 2007.

If this data had been available a few days earlier, you could have been informed in the issue of 4-5-07, but it just didn’t work out that way.  So, I’m not about to accept any of the blame for not informing you in a timely manner.

The primal compulsion to introduce tomato saplings into the good earth arises in most gardeners the first day that the bank thermometer pegs out at eighty, and few can resist the siren call to vie for the blue ribbon for producing the first ripe tomato in Comanche County.  And, I’m man enough to confess that I’m one of that number.

During the winter months it’s my practice to clip the tomato photos from the grocery store ads and dice them up for the salads prepared in my kitchen.  Those shards of paper are just as tasty as the look alikes foisted off as hot house tomatoes in the fresh food racks, and the economics are an additional reason for that desperate practice.

Anyways, my sallies to the coffee shop in the AMs normally reveal other poor souls with heads as hard as mine.  We never learn that the initial surge of tomato planting is comparable to taking flight with a Kamikaze aviator and without a parachute.

Once again we’ve been betrayed by the return of the scissortail bird and the greening of the lacy leaf mesquite.  Those two infallible harbingers of the signaling of “no more freezes” have duped us.  The regaining of Senate and House majorities may actually be contributing factors in this waffling of temperatures that makes tomato raising such a chancy endeavor.

Be that as it may, it’s high time for the installation of paper sack shelters for my row of tomatoes, and even though you will mot be in receipt of this communiqué until too late, no apology will be forthcoming from this branch of agricultural advice.

You may howsomever, have this column laminated in a plastic coat and affix it to your refrigerator door as a reminder next year.

And, as Gayle McGinnis always advised me when the planting of tomatoes was our subject of discussion:

“The safest thing to do is to always wait until the last frost before you put your tomato plants out.”

Let me hear from you.

My phone number is 254-893-5063, my official postal address is: 333 W AYERS AVE – DE LEON TX 76444-2113, and you can e-mail Charles@CharlesChupp.com.