In the early 1970s I was fortunate to share a charming small brick farmhouse with a rotating cast of friends in rural Central Kentucky. The rent was $60.00 per month for three of us. The house sat atop a hill near the Kentucky River.

There was no running water. A cistern collected rain from the roof that birds shit on. Our landlord said a cap of Clorox would purify the water. I can’t swear this is scientific, but I don’t recall any of us becoming deathly ill, either. The two-seater outhouse was a safe distance away. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn the house down with the cheap twenty-dollar sheet metal wood-burning stove.  

What the little house lacked in modern amenities, it  made up for as a launchpad for imagination. I felt like I had returned to my early childhood years in the scrawny, magical woods at the end of my Louisville suburban street in the late 1950s. Later I could count on soothing resonance in the beautiful fields and woods around this little Jessamine County farm. One day serendipity handed me a buckeye leaf. Growing a few tomatoes every year became an obsession. An extraordinary tomato pie came 50 years later.

I will never forget witnessing the thick and shiny, resinous, spear-point-shaped, mahogany-colored buds on a yellow buckeye unfurling its palmate leaves. These were the first spring leaves on the hillside deciduous forest along the Kentucky River. Cause for celebration every spring since.

Our landlord Odell Lowery was a sweetheart

We paid rent on time and painted the house for Odell. Brothers Lavert and Elsie hired us to house burley tobacco in a hot black barn for several weeks in late summer. It was a sweaty job that paid a handsome $5.00 cash an hour. It didn’t take long to pay the rent. The bonus was a sense of community in the barn and around a noontime table of at least seven of us, and a hearty home-cooked meal with platters of fried chicken, meatloaf, fried ham, mashed potatoes—sometimes sweet potatoes— collard greens, green beans cooked to death with a ham hock, and big slices of heirloom tomatoes that Jim Wilson remembers as, “the best ever.” All of this was finished with a fresh baked pie and washed down with pitchers of sweet tea.

One of our roommates, Bo “Burley Boy” Hobson, was a vegetarian. Elsie cautioned Odell at the first of many meals. “Bo don’t eat no meat. I think he’s Catholic.” This was said without judgement.

Elsie Lowery 1975

Elsie plowed up garden space for us adjacent to the burley tobacco field down the hill from the house. He sowed tobacco and tomato seeds in early March. The tobacco bed was sterilized for weeds with burning firewood loaded on a sled of thick wire mesh and slowly dragged  over the seed bed with his tractor. Seeds of tobacco and tomatoes were sown and covered with a tobacco canvas until they were sized enough to line out around the middle of May. (The tobacco canvas protected the seedlings from frost but could be rolled up to allow seedlings to harden off and then rolled back on if a late frost was imminent.)

The Lowerys canned a lot of tomatoes

I suppose they expected we would too. We planted at least 50 tomatoes.  Six would have been enough. At least for in-house tomato sandwiches on white toast slathered with mayonnaise to feed the three us and lots of visiting friends. We tried canning, but it was too hot without a strong will or air conditioning.

Tomatoes were my gateway to gardening. I was a late bloomer.

Summer tomato sandwiches continue as a ritual. Fresh sourdough is my bread of choice these days. Little in tomatoes has changed over the last fifty years, besides a renaissance of flavorful heirlooms.

But last summer my introduction to a special tomato pie was a revelation.

Alison Roman’s tomato pie recipe 2026

Julie Johnson brought the pie to our table in Salvisa last summer that sparked an epiphany as magical as a yellow buckeye leafing out in spring.

Lucky buckeyes last September

Salvisa floral in August

Allen Bush, Bo Hobson, Jim Wilson and Charlie Bond with LuDaddy near Nicholasville, Kentucky in 1975.

How could I have gone 50 years without tasting anything so summer divine or as simple as Alison Roman’s tomato tart recipe?

Maybe the August garden looks better because of it. There is no shortage of flowers. Here is the recipe: