This tea comes about because I’ve been pinching suckers off my tomato plants, which are gigantic monsters.

 

I know what some of you are thinking right now: tomato leaves? Aren’t those poisonous?

 

The answer is…not really. Tomato leaves will cause you stomach upset if you eat too many of them, but the amount you have to eat for that to happen is a HUGE number of tomato leaves, which most people will not be able to eat even if they tried. This is actually true of a large number of our “safe” greens: spinach, for instance, would also make you sick if you ate way too much of it. So the short version is that tomato leaves are generally safe in moderation.

 

And the amount you pinch off as suckers is not going to cause you harm (assuming you don’t have nightshade allergies), even if you don’t see a sucker until it gets pretty big. That’s what happened when I made tea out of this one.

 

See, I like the scent of tomato leaves: they’re pretty awesome. I like the taste of tomato leaves: chopped up, they make a really delicious herb that adds a flavor that’s like a delicate, vegetal tomato. So I figured…tomato leaf tea? Why not give it a try?

 

Here’s the thing: I crammed the pot full of tomato leaves, and I could taste the tomato leaf flavor and smell the tomato leaf scent, but it may have been a little too delicate for me. The full flavor didn’t really steep out, which was unfortunate, because I do in fact like the flavor!

 

I will probably do more experiments to see if I can make it work, but this may just be a thing to dry and use as an herb.

I got these particular suckers from my sungold tomato plant, which has already produced a few of the most delicious tomatoes I’ve ever eaten in my life.

So I was going to write this section of the newsletter this afternoon, but I went for a walk with my husband and on the course of our walk, we ran into a very small dog running across a busy street. We grabbed the dog, knocked on a bunch of doors, realized that nobody was home, and took her to our home for her safety. We’re currently setting up flyers and posting on the online dog sites (including Nextdoor—posting there reminds me why I never want to be on the site), and once people get home from work, we will take her back out and knock on doors to try to find her owner.

This dog is extremely trainable. Someone taught her to sit before me, but it took me about 15 minutes with a clicker to get her to understand “down” and another ten minutes to realize that barking and whining at me for attention would just make me put the treats away.

 

She is extremely food motivated, super eager to please, and incredibly impatient. This makes her easy to train: animals like this want desperately and will give up instantly, and so outlasting them is simple.

 

Pele was mostly easy to train. The times his training was hard was when we were trying to train him to do something he didn’t want to do. As an example, when he was a puppy, he used to hurl himself at the door anytime we came close to it to try to charge out of it with us. For the first month of his life, we had to push him, roll him, whatever him just to try to get outside without him.

 

We tried other things at first: offering him a treat that he would have to chew, or a high value treat if he would sit somewhere else. These worked the first few times, until he realized that we were offering him a trade: high value treat—a liver treat that he absolutely went bonkers for—but we would leave him.

 

He decided he wanted to be with us more than he wanted the high value treat. Once he understood what was on offer, he refused. (And he never, ever in his entire life ate that liver treat again.)

 

In order to actually train him, we had to understand that the thing he wanted more than anything was to be with us, and so the thing on offer had to be…being with us.

 

So we’d put the leash on him (the sign that he was allowed to go out), tell him to sit, tell him to wait, open the door—he’d charge it, and we’d close the door. Over and over and over and over again, until he realized that this was a new bargain. If he wanted to go out with us, he had to sit with an open door until we said it was okay.

 

Training a dog is not much like programming a computer: where you input commands and get results. It’s very much like communication and bargaining, where in order to get the dog to behave like a good citizen, you have to understand why it’s doing what it’s doing, and what trade you can offer it that will induce it to behave.

 

In many ways, training animals reminds me about patience: patience with them, and patience with myself. Humans spend a lot more time getting ourselves to do things we don’t want to do than just about any other species of animal, and if you really think about how brains work, that is both a marvel and also extremely depressing. We are extremely good at bargaining with ourselves: at putting things off until later, at telling ourselves that we don’t deserve treats yet. Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we don’t deserve treats ever, which is a pretty rude thing to tell to any animal.

 

Research shows that if you’re training a dog and it fails more than 15% of the time, the dog starts getting anxious and depressed. The dog should succeed 85% of the time, and if it’s not succeeding at the thing you gave it to do, you should give it something easier. Humans, unfortunately, are allowed to fail a lot, and nobody intervenes and gives them treats.

 

So it’s nice to sit with someone for whom life is a little simpler: someone who is always a good girl, someone where the bargain is clear and the stakes are simple. Sit, and you can have a treat.

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