“Wha’d life be without homegrown tomatoes”—Our first homegrown Mr. Stripey tomato in the making (note the tiny trichomes lining each of the vines).

“Only two things money can’t buy, That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes…” — Guy Clark, “Homegrown Tomatoes”

I have concluded that time travel is most certainly possible. In fact, I do it myself quite frequently. Most recently, I traveled from my backyard here at the farm in Louisville all the way back to my childhood home in Ellistown, MS. It was a journey back in time some forty-five years and it was made possible by a tomato.

Actually, it was a tomato vine or, more specifically, the smell of the vine that transported me back across the years to our family garden. It’s amazing to me that simply inhaling a scent has that power, yet there I was transformed from a grown man in his fifties walking past his tomatoes into a sweaty kid picking tomatoes in the garden alongside his mom.

I watched as my hand plucked each tomato, beads of dew hanging on the hair-like trichomes that covered the vines. After carefully placing the red beefstakes into the bucket, my focus was drawn to a plump green tomato hornworm crawling up the stalk, its numerous fake “eyes” peering at me from alongside the length of its body.

Astounded by my “scent-sational” experience with the “tomato time machine,” I found myself in the days that followed researching the powers of our olfactory senses. Not surprisingly, it seems that our sense of smell outranks any of our other senses when it comes to associated memories.

According to a 2019 discover.com article by Ashley Hamer, “smells have a stronger link to memory and emotion than any of the other senses.” It seems that our sense of smell has a more direct route to our central processing unit—the brain.

“When you see, hear, touch, or taste something, that sensory information first heads to the thalamus, which acts as your brain’s relay station…but with smells, it’s different. Scents bypass the thalamus and go straight to the brain’s smell center, known as the olfactory bulb,” explains Hamer.

Furthermore, “The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, which might explain why the smell of something can so immediately trigger a detailed memory or even intense emotion.”

Now I’m no neurological expert, but I do remember that the hippocampus plays a major role in our memory storage. Thus, our sense of smell takes the express lane to our memory which, for this country boy, perfectly explains why those memories are so vivid.

G and I recently finished planting a raised garden bed, a combination vegetable, herb, and pollinator garden. Throughout that process, I never really thought about the large garden my family always had when I was a child. However, one whiff of those aromatic tomato vines when I walked by and I was a kid again standing in the middle of that fertile patch of ground in North Mississippi.

The memory also brought to mind how much as a youngster I loathed working in that garden in the humid heat of the Mississippi summer. Now, I appreciate a garden more for the reward that it is. I feel a great sense of pride over the smallest pepper or green tomato and derive immense joy in watching the bees go about their business of pollinating each flower.

Aside from my disinclination for gardening as a lad, the smell of those tomato vines reminded me of how much I missed the fresh vegetables later in life when I didn’t have a garden of my own.

During that time, G and I became big fans of the local farmer’s market, However, there truly is no substitute for actually taking part in the process versus simply engaging in a transaction. Nonetheless, the reality is that I feel good when I do both, and both I believe to be much better than buying mass produced fruits and vegetables in the grocery.

For me, there is a feeling that comes with growing your own, a feeling of making a difference in the world. In the words of Wendell Berry, “…I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.”

There’s still much more that we can do here at the farm, but our little backyard garden is a start. I’m proud of the heirloom Mr. Stripey and beefsteak tomatoes growing from the repurposed mailbox (yes, you read that correctly) just outside of our backdoor alongside our pollinator, pepper, and herb garden.

I knew the benefits when we planted the small garden and, like Guy Clark,“…ain’t nothin’ in the world that I like better than bacon and lettuce and homegrown tomatoes.” However, I never realized until now that tomatoes also enable time travel.

Until next time, here’s to backyard gardens, BLTs, and memories that last a lifetime.

Email outdoors columnist Brad Dye at braddye@comcast.net.