Eating tomatoes can be a real pleasure, and even more so if you have grown them in your garden. In a time when more and more seedlings are bought to grow and fill the pantry with vegetables, vegetables, or fruit, Sybil Gorby seems to have won an award for perseverance. This lady from Tyler County, Texas, has been using the same tomato since 1965. In other words, she continues to grow the same seed every year to obtain tomatoes that she describes as “the most delicious” she has ever tasted, as she explained to The Washington Post.
She saved seeds from the first ones he had and every season she repeats the process. Let a few dry on a paper towel, and plant them in the spring, they begin to bloom in June, and harvest the fruits in mid-August. Big, shiny, and often whimsically shaped tomatoes, ready to be plucked and savored.
Gorby, who is 92 years old and worked as a nurse for 45 years, believes that what makes these tomatoes special is that they are sweet. She doesn’t want to take all the credit for this fruit herself because — she remembers — at the beginning of having the garden, a good friend gave her the tomato plants. Over the years, tomatoes have been gaining fame.
“They are juicy and delicious,” said her daughter Sandy Marody in the Facebook group where she shared images of the mother with the harvest. Although the daughter also grows some from the same seed, she says they don’t grow as well as her mother’s.
She likes sharing as much or more than cultivating
In the Washington Post article, Gorby explains that, when he was a teenager, he started helping tend to a neighbor’s vegetable garden. She fell in love with horticulture and gardening and cultivated this hobby, redundancy notwithstanding when she went to live with her husband on a farm near Houston in 1963.
Potatoes, tender beans, corn, pumpkins, or courgettes are grown, as well as flowers and other plants.
Always sharing the harvest with family, friends, and neighbors because, she explains, the only thing she likes more than savoring what she has grown is sharing it with other people, especially her family and especially her 8 grandchildren that have.
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Sybil Gorby’s tomatoes have had their moment of glory on Facebook, leading to people she didn’t know contacting her daughter to buy the seeds. Gorby, however, is a bit superstitious and has preferred to give away the seeds rather than sell them.
The difficulties associated with age have led him to reduce the size of the garden. At the best of times, the tomato trees were so tall that a ladder had to be used to collect the fruit.
Taking care of the garden keeps her active and she is clear: this is the secret to a long and happy life.