thelocaldiner.com

In the 1970s, at the intersection of State Highway 85 and Interstate 90 in Belgrade, there stood the light towers and grandstand of the original Gallatin Speedway, the tall dark pyramid of a sawmill smokestack, and the two long plastic quonset greenhouses of my grandparents’ tomato farm.Â? The screaming stockcar races and the soot-belching pyramid disappeared from the intersection years ago, but those greenhouses remained.Â? Until sometime last month, apparently.

My grandparents built Belmont Gardens from scratch in the late 1960s as a semi-retirement project after decades of dipping candies and jerking sodas at their fountain on Main Street in Bozeman.Â? It was a state-of-the-art climate-controlled hydroponic operation at the time, densely packed rows of tomato vines pollenated by some sort of walking reverse-vacuum my grandfather referred to as “bee machine”.Â? Inside the greenhouses was hot, moist, and almost pungent with the fragrance of tomato plants.Â? Outside in the shop the perfectly red and sweet tomatoes lined the shelves in row after row of flat boxes, 24 or so per box, prices indicated in my legally-blind grandfather’s large felt-tip script.Â? There would always be a few spare fruits on the table by the cash register for my brother and me, and a rusty salt shaker filled with sugar (not salt) to season them.Â? It must have been the sugar that got me started on a lifetime tomato habit.

I would join my grandmother for deliveries in her station wagon, with her little dog, a bag of stale Cheetos, and an oldies station punched in on the a.m. radio.Â? We drove a circuit that started at Lee & Dad’s in Belgrade, then head to Bozeman for stops at Van’s on North 7th, Heeb’s on East Main, and Thriftway in Livingston.Â? (Amazingly, all of these family supermarkets are still in business, though it’s a little harder to get local produce at them.)Â? Along the way, she recited with me the names of the mountain ranges as they appeared over the dashboard:Â? Tubacaruts, Bridgers, Spanish Peaks, Hi-lights, Ubsorkees.Â? I didn’t learn the spelling at the time, and that helped me with the pronunciation.

Almost twenty years ago, my grandparents sold the tomato farm and moved to a new development on what was then the outskirts of Bozeman, in a modest rambler that at the time had a clear view of most of those ranges I learned about.Â? As the years passed, my grandfather died, newer and bigger houses sprung up between the rambler and the ranges, and my grandmother eventually moved back to her childhood home of Livingston and into a rest home.Â? But every time I drove I-90 through Belgrade on my way to see her, those greenhouses stood sentry over our memories of the place, surrounded first by a farm implement dealer, then a used car lot, then a housebuilder’s model homes.

This past Mother’s Day weekend I found the greenhouses torn down.Â? It was the model homes that eventually conquered those greenhouses, of course.Â? Belgrade is Montana’s fastest growing city, adding more than 20% to its population in the last few years as variations on those model homes begin to fill in the I-90 corridor to Bozeman.Â? Demand for housing is so high that my grandparents’ house and shop stood braced on trailers, ready to be dropped into some new cul-de-sac.Â? Maybe if someone could have moved into those two long plastic quonset greenhouses, they would still be standing at the intersection of State Highway 85 and Interstate 90 in Belgrade.

We planted our garden just before the wedding planning got crazy, then became its absentee landlords during weekend planning trips, honeymoons, and other weddings. Between weeks of neglect, and Lena’s “early harvest’ of our onion, beet, carrot, and pea seedbeds (she dug a foot-deep trench through it), I had nearly given up hope.

But earlier this week, after yet another weekend away from what was left of the garden, I noticed Lena gnawing on a big green roma tomato. Lo and behold, several more had managed to swell beneath the undergrowth. So I ran out, grabbed a couple of stakes, and opened them up to more of the ripening sun. Now they just have to beat the frost.

We had no idea what perennials and bulbs had been planted by our predecessors, and there was only so much mulching could do to clean up the beds. As it happened, there was a whole lot of morning glory looking to climb a trellis we had removed, so instead it strangled the herb garden (pictured). But I noticed that our herbs were hanging on among the weeds. It looked like there were salvageable leaves of rosemary, sage, basil, and oregano, along with hearty stands of fennel, peppermint, and (thanks to Spot’s tending) catnip. Autumn had worked late pulling together her classroom, and I smelled an opportunity.

I threw some frozen gorgonzola-walnut and sundried tomato-cheese ravioli from the Real Food Store into a pot, and picked some herbs. The rosemary and sage went into a saucepan with browning butter, then over the gorgonzola ravioli. The basil and oregano went into a simmering can of crushed tomatoes (alas, not our own), then over the sundried-tomato ravioli. Delicious. Next month we’ll have tomatoes, and next year veggies, but this week herbs will do.

We knew when we found piles of deer scat in our small fenced yard that we would have trouble eating food from our garden before the deer did. I saw a family of three deer on the way to the supermarket a while ago. And last week, as I walked home from work, two fully grown does stared me down from the middle of the sidewalk, one block from our house in the middle of Helena.

According to a recent New York Times article (reg. req.), there are 50 times more deer in America–25 to 30 million of them–than there were a century ago:

Across the country, deer cause 1.5 million traffic accidents, $1.1 billion in vehicle damage and 150 deaths a year, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va. The highest populations occur where guns are banned.

“Back in the early 1970’s, Princeton banned the discharge of firearms, and deer-car collisions went up 600 percent,” said Susan Martka, a wildlife biologist for New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Now the gardeners are getting even–they’re hiring sharpshooters and bowhunters to protect their greens. Do they make gardening aprons in blaze orange?