It's been a long growing season here in Minneapolis. The picture above was taken this afternoon and there are still plenty of tomatoes on the vines. We've been lucky to have a pretty good crop of tomatoes this year, especially our Black Cherry plant. For about a 3-4 week stretch, we were pulling off 5 lbs of cherry tomatoes off of that one plant, every 4-5 days.
The one thing that was frustrating this year were the really hot temps. That killed some early flowers but when the weather returned to "normal," the flowers came back, so now you see all of the green tomatoes on the vines in late September. I'm leaving them on until the temps really dip. This weekend is supposed to be in the 80's so maybe I'll get a few more to blush before I pick my last harvest.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the chipmunks were eating their fair share of my tomatoes. They live in the boulder retaining wall that divides my yard with my neighbors. Apparently, they liked the tomatoes so much that they've started growing their own, probably from my tomato's seeds. Here's a picture of a 20" plant growing out of the rocks. I've never seen this before and actually thought it was a weed until I noticed the little yellow flowers. It's about 10 feet from the closest tomato plant so my best guess is that the little rodents left some seeds in the cracks or something.
1 comment:
The random joy of in-ground growing, Russ. Plus the ones planted this way by definition seem to have survival genes. Sounds like your summer was much like ours. Nice steady tomatoe harvest--will post on it soon.
Post a Comment