Breaking Tomato News

After my last post on tomatoes, I got merciless about picking flowers off the plants, hoping that this would push them to put their energy into ripening existing fruit. That effort appears to have paid off, with help from some unseasonably warm weather. Here on the left is a mixture of tomatoes from the volunteers and some from the plants we bought. I have no idea where the seed for the yellow ones came from. This is stuff that has been ripening inside for about a week.

Today, I picked a bunch more. Here (right) is what came off the volunteers today.

And then below, in the black bowl, is what came off the commercially started cherry tomato plants today. So far, there is one tomato on the Pennsylvania heirloom plants that is starting to turn orange, but the rest are mostly green. Finally, there are three volunteer butternut squash (below left). Tomorrow we have dinner with a colleague of Lola's, and we'll be using some of our harvest in a pasta salad.

Today, the man who put new gutters on the house came to do the same to the garage. When I saw him out back, he asked what I had done to make the tomato plants grow so large. "Those bad boys are goin' crazy," he said. We ended up talking for a bit about gardening. As a gutter-installer, you see a lot of yards, and our man says we have some of the best tomato plants around.