Home Grown Tomato

(photo by a Cabinet Gardener)

One of the things I love about gardening: the plants keep growing even while you're dealing with other things. A while back, I posted about the Cabinet Garden, a low-cost, low-tech, low-maintenance assembly I set up some miles away from my main site. This tomato was picked today--December Fifth!--from that garden. It isn't the prettiest tomato ever, and there are only a few still on the vines, but this is my first year trying for a separate fall crop for tomatoes, and I have to say I'm hooked!

Nearly a month ago, at the year's first frost-warning, I cut some fruit-heavy vines to invert and hang, an old salvage technique that's supposed to result in better flavor than picking the tomatoes and force-ripening with sunlight or in a bag with an apple. But the harvest-window for those is apparently quite short, the fruit going quickly from ripe to only-usable-for-seeds. Or maybe in place of sun-dried? Today's tomato and its pink-cheeked still-ripening brethren are the tomatoes I left in place, as they weren't large enough to salvage. But I covered the plants, that night and again during our recent freezes, and the plants have not yet succumbed.

Tomatoes in December. Without supplemental lighting, heat, hand-pollination, grafting, or any of the rest of the interventions.

Two words:

Wow.

And,

Yum!