Unsolicited product endorsement: The Ultomato

Unsolicited product endorsement: The Ultomato July 2, 2015

• It’s almost July, when your tomato plants may start drooping or tilting or falling over completely. Maybe you’ve got those wire-hoop tomato-cages and your plants are starting to outgrow them. Maybe you bought the medium-sized cages and you’re now realizing you should’ve gotten the large or extra-large ones, but now it’s too late, because you can’t get the small circles at the bottom of those cages around the branches of a late-June tomato plant.

This is just one of several reasons why I hate tomato cages. They’re the wire coat hanger of the gardening world and it’s time we went all Mommie Dearest and stopped trying to make them work.

If your tomato plants need support at this point in the summer, you need the Ultomato. (Here is where the grainy black-and-white video of people grimacing, frustrated to tears by their wire tomato cages, transitions to full-color video of smiling, attractive people happily using the Ultomato.)

UltomatoDumb name. Brilliant product. It’s a set of green plastic stakes with adjustable arms that can be detached and re-attached around your plants (and not just tomato plants, either). It’s like a Lego set for your garden. You can add more stakes or arms or move them around at any point. You can build scaffolds or trellises or whatever you need to keep everything ship-shape, and you’re not stuck with the guess-work of the cages you set up (or forgot to set up) back in early Spring.

No wire hangers ever! Get yourself an Ultomato instead. You’re welcome.

• “God is a resident alien, a lonely stranger, existentially alone.”

Chaplain Mike’s discussion of Christian sexual ethics a little while back is notable for noticing something too frequently overlooked: Any talk of “sex must be for procreation” gets crushed by the Song of Solomon.

We’ve got 66 books in the Christian Bible. One of them is an erotic poem that celebrates non-procreative sex as fruit sweet to the taste (ahem). And no, God doesn’t punish anybody in Song of Solomon for doing that.

It’s biblical. Deal with it.

• “The evening was already a disaster; might as well eat bugs.”

• David Fahrenthold’s collection of “81 things that Mike Huckabee has denounced” is a work of art.

• The “discover” button in the Feedly app is right next to the refresh/save/exit buttons. So is the “Tweet this” button.

This is why, if you’re falling asleep while reading your Feedly feed, you can wind up tweeting a link to some Endgadget article about Uber for speedboats that you’ve never read and likely never will. Sorry about that.

(Fortunately, thanks to the leap second, I’m all caught up on my sleep now.)


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