I set a goal last Winter, in the cold, here at home looking after my husband in his slow and steady recovery from a life-saving surgery, to learn How to Grow Tomatoes. I have made several posts about it, and will add links here but for now you can search the blog to find them. Learned how to choose varieties, selected them and raised the plants from seed under fluorescent lights on the kitchen bar, set them out and mourned when they froze to death, set out the "leftovers" and watched them impatiently as they reached a stage of growth and then seemed to go dormant in this funny cool Spring.
And then, God sent the rain. Glorious abundant rain. It started with a nice shower, then a couple of weeks later, eight inches of water poured from the sky onto my garden and everything took off! Things sprounted that I had forgotten I had even planted. The tomatoes GREW!
Watched again as they bloomed and filled with greem fruit - fruit that sat on the plants as though waiting for an invitation to dress for dinner. I wondered if they would ever ripen. They just grew larger and continued to bloom and make even more fruit.
And finally last week, they started in. First a fruit here, and another there. Now, I am gathering a gallon a day. That is half a peck - a kind soul on the tomato mania group let me know that a peck equals 2 gallons.
We are having a blast tasting these beautiful fruits. I've never tasted many of these heirlooms, so have been imagining their flavors all Winter. They do not disappoint. The black and purple ones are rich and sweet and complex. The pink ones are perfect and balanced. The red tomatoes are acidic and tomato-ey. They are all wonderful.
I sell some at our County's Farmer's Market each Saturday morning, and have a little table set up outside the house for excess during the week. Most importantly, I am canning the excess, so we will have our own tomatoes for the winter. More on that in another post. For now, I am just enjoying the harvest!
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