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It was while pondering what is worse — plum skin on the roof of one’s mouth or popcorn seed husk in one’s teeth — that I began pondering a rather peculiar dream I had Sunday night — the problem of tomatoes.

Yeah, I know, my mind is strange in its meanderings. The less we dwell on this the better off we’ll all be.

This particular dream was specific to the tomatoes in my garden, which knowing what I know about dreams comes from the fact that I’ve been thinking a lot about them recently. Even more specifically — what exactly am I going to do about them.

A number of years ago, when I made the decision to put my green thumb in the ground to try and grow my own produce, I came upon this singular question for the first time. Not exactly being one for planning things out fully to the end, I planted a number of tomato plants only for them to grow extremely well and producing (hah! Producing. Produce … tomatoes … get it?) a large number of fruit that quickly became an issue of counter space.

I remember watching the tomatoes slowly accumulate on the counter of the kitchen as we tried to manage the problem they were becoming. A lot of BLT’s but perhaps more consequential, I got really good at making pasta sauce and chili. Man, we ate a lot of pasta and chili. An unhealthy amount of pasta and chili, but no matter how much that I forced into our lives to try and keep up with the growing number of tomatoes, they just kept accumulating.

Luckily my mom came to the rescue through the process of canning, which I had absolutely no clue how to do. Her and dad came over one weekend and mom and I went to work on the tomatoes that had by this point taken over the entire left side of our counter, nearly to the wall.

Over the course of a very long Sunday we produced several jars of tomatoes, which would multiply over the coming weeks as the tomatoes kept coming.

As the years progressed I would do more canning including the pickling of cucumbers, however, these last two years not so much. Last year’s drought and the drier conditions the years before clamped down on the number of tomatoes I had available for canning.

It was equal parts disappointing and relieving. It was nice to have a couple years of not having to dedicate an entire afternoon to canning. Instead, I could dedicate an entire afternoon to making my own booze.

Potato … um, potato — you know, that doesn’t work nearly as well in print.

Still, another small part of me was hoping for more tomatoes again and thanks to the monsoon rains we’ve been receiving, my wish has been granted. With Mother Nature’s rigorous irrigation plan for our little neck of the woods, my garden has never looked so good. Aside from my on-going hostilities with Japanese beetles, my grape vines are crawling all over the place and threatening the peppers which are producing like never before and the cabbage leaves could act as sales for an 18th century ship of the line.

And my tomatoes. The tallest plant in my forest of tomatoes is nearly up to my chest and following suit are the tomatoes themselves. There are a lot of them and it is clear that I will need to break out the canning supplies once again.

It’s no surprise then, that I would dream about them. In this particular dream I went out to begin bringing in some early changers. At first I started putting them in a plastic bin, but somehow, as dreams do, the plants kept delivering tomatoes to me where tomatoes shouldn’t have been. Quickly the bin was overflowing and necessitated the need to start dumping them in a large barrel that filled up entirely too fast. Not only that, the tomatoes themselves would alternate between red and back to green again, causing me to be confused by what I should be picking.

As the dream progressed and the barrel refused to be filled fully, despite it being to the top, the tomatoes themselves would continue growing, except the skins weren’t growing with them. This resulted in the skins of the tomatoes breaking, creating a stupidly large mess of tomato pulp.

And then, rather suddenly, horizontally shaped tomatoes started showing up.

All of this, like the dream, came to an end as I tried figuring out how to get the barrel into the house.

I awoke at exactly 4:30 a.m., curiously wondering as to the dream’s meaning as well as what exactly is wrong with me. In the end, the dream seems pretty clear. What’s wrong with me? Not so much.

At least I don’t have to buy the peppers needed for pasta sauce and chili now.