I created my Church of Dirt and Flowers, a perennial garden in our front yard, for only one purpose: to share beauty and joy with anyone who walks by.

In our back yard, though, I wanted a no-frills space for growing vegetables. While my husband, Lee, built five raised garden beds, I drew detailed diagrams for each bed and color-coded the plants and seeds by category. (My favorite T-shirt says, “Hold on. Let me overthink this.”) I planned one bed for arugula, savoy spinach, four kinds of lettuce and a small zucchini plant. Two beds celebrated my northern Italian heritage with broccolini (more tender than broccoli), fennel, shell beans, carrots and two artichoke plants. The herb garden was fragrant with rosemary, basil, lemon thyme and flat-leaf parsley, and I reserved a fifth bed for heirloom tomatoes.

By midsummer that first year, reality had already chewed holes in my garden hat. I realized, too late, that my elaborate diagrams actually required at least an acre of garden space. I had crammed too many plants into relatively small beds, depleted the nutrients in the soil and ignored a basic natural law: plants grow and spread. Aphids and cabbage moths infested the broccolini. Lettuce bolted in the heat while the arugula ran wild. The shell beans turned mealy in my minestrone soup, and the carrots tasted like soap. The two thistlelike plants that I thought were artichokes were actually cardoons and produced only purple flowers and allegedly edible stalks. As ever, the zucchini plant seemed bent on world domination.

I waited to buy tomato plants until after I’d prepped all the new raised beds, sown way too many vegetable seeds and chased wild geese while trying to find artichoke plants. By then, the Italian and heirloom tomatoes were sold out at local garden centers, and it was too late to order them from garden catalogs.

I settled for a couple of Early Girls, poked them into big pots, set them on our patio and frowned every time I looked at them. Early Girls were practically a cliché. Everybody bought them. I wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes: Genovese, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine. Or tomatoes with cool names: Berkeley Tie-Dye, Cosmonaut Volkov, Little Napoli, Husky Red. (Lee and I are University of Washington alumnae.) A few weeks later, though, several of my first choices were back in stock locally. I brought home six fancy varieties, planted them and hid the Early Girls at the back end of the patio. I had become a tomato snob.

I’d chosen them by default, but the Early Girls shook off the disrespect and quickly grew strong and bushy. As their name promised, they were also the first to produce fruit, with a tasty, sweet-tart flavor and an excellent texture for slicing. I’d planted them in June and expected them to wimp out by August, but they just kept thriving.

Meanwhile, the elite tomatoes developed more slowly, produced fewer fruits, tasted bland or were too squishy to slice. I had been drawn to the rarer varieties because of their heirloom pedigrees, or their pink and lime-green streaks or their clever names.

My Early Girls don’t need glitter or polka dots; they’re already best in show. This red-faced tomato snob deserves the holes in my garden hat.

Craft Rozen writes about gardening and family life from her home in Moscow. She may be contacted at scraftroze@aol.com.