Like a sleeping red giant, a tomato glows

Here it is: my first tomato of the year!

This heat is good for one thing…

My first tomato has set fruit!

If a squirrel can plant corn, I can too

It’s finally shorts weather, and I went a little nuts today planting warm-weather seeds. In my herb garden, where a squirrel grew some corn last year, I planted to some corn. Also a random packet of sweet basil, which may or may not sprout. In the pocket where I grow a tomato, I sowed edamame, […]

Penultimate Harvest

A frost warning sent me out to my community garden plot yesterday to gather all the green tomatoes that were never going to get ripe. I picked a heavy bagful of tomatoes, a few from my Butter Bush, a lot from the Rutgers, plus four more huge tomatoes from a volunteer tomato plant in my […]

Compost fixes everything

Finally, finally one of my compost tumblers finished cooking the leaves and weeds, and finally I emptied it. So today I brought over a couple more bags of compost to my community garden plot, and the most important “finally” is that the whole plot has a layer of compost on it. The best part is […]

Tomato in the snow?

After a snowstorm, you expect to see scallions poking out the snow. You’re not even all that surprised to find snapdragons cheerily smiling at you. But a tomato plant should not be looking frisky when a couple inches of wet snow melts away. Nor should you be glimpsing red under the vines. So you can […]

These are definitely the last tomatoes

There’s a chance of wet snow tonight, and even though I don’t entirely believe it, that’s still cold enough to tell the last two tomato hangers-on that it’s time to come in. This is nothing like the end of season bowls brimming with green tomatoes that I’ve harvested in the past. Just two. If I […]

Sometimes red means go ahead and eat

The various bright reds in the garden are catching my eye. Tomatoes are red. Strawberries are red. Raspberries are red. Even crabapples and rose hips are red. They are the reds of little round traffic lights, Reds that mean Stop and pick me, Reds than mean Go ahead and eat me.

Maybe these are the last tomatoes?

After I picked the “last” tomato, my Celebrity tomato plant is not giving up. It’s ripening three in good shape and there’s two more on the other side of the plant in not so good shape. I think it’s taking a personal challenge to see how long it can make summer last. It’s done a […]

Is this the last ripe tomato?

The rate of tomatoes ripening has fallen from three at a time, to one at a time. But as the weather cools and the days shorten, I don’t expect to get any more ripe tomatoes at all. So this might be one last gift from my tomato plant. Never mind how dead half of it […]