Well, those eight tomato plants I have that started out scraggly
and grew into one enormous tomato bush have begun producing. With a
vengeance.
Well, those eight tomato plants I have that started out scraggly and grew into one enormous tomato bush have begun producing. With a vengeance.
Because the plants grew into one mass, overpowered their cages an sprawled across the walk, it’s pretty difficult to see what’s going on underneath. On top, they look pretty harmless – just some green tomatoes, a few ripe ones and lots and lots of leaves.
But when the digging begins is when I find all manner of tomatoes – mostly ripe and waiting to be harvested. That’s the hard part. Eight fully grown tomato plants are pretty heavy, and moving them to pick what’s underneath can be something like weightlifting.
And there are a lot of tomatoes to harvest. The few ripe ones on top give no indication of the dozens underneath that are ready. I picked at least 25 for the first harvest and another 15 on the second round. That’s not counting the six to 10 bug-eaten or rotten ones that get tossed each time.
Now, I guess I brought this on myself – what gardener in his or her right mind plants eight tomato plants? Well, the answer is: me, and I would like to argue that I was in my right mind and that my decision to plant so many was based in sound reasoning.
That reasoning is this: I have, heretofore, had a mostly brown thumb. While I have been able to grow a couple of plants for a few months at a time, they have mostly wound up dead before they could produce any fruit, or they produced very little fruit and then whithered away and died.
So, using my growing record as a guide, I did some quick math and figured that most of what I planted would not survive my nurturing efforts. In order to maximize my yield, I planted everything I got and didn’t thin anything.
I received five beefsteak tomatoes from fellow gardener Cynthia Walker, and while they didn’t do so well when I first transplanted them, they now make up the bulk of my massive tomato bush. I received one cherry tomato plant as a birthday gift from a friend, and two seeds planted a year or two ago popped up as volunteers. Once again, referring to my record, the odds that these eight plants would live long enough to flower, let alone produce fruit, were pretty dismal.
See? Gardening is a numbers game to some extent, and I weighed the odds and planted accordingly. This was a perfectly logical way to go about gardening for someone who has had little success in the past.
But for some reason, this year, my luck turned. Except for my cucumber, my plants have all done remarkably well. Which brings us back to the dozens of tomatoes that keep ripening on the eight plants that have managed to survive despite my care.
We’ve given a lot away – people are more inclined to accept tomatoes than zucchini – but we’ve still got a kitchen counterful with more to come. I’ve learned my lesson – plant no more than three tomato plants in a year. And I’ve got my work cut out for me … I’ll be the one making and freezing buckets of spaghetti sauce.
