Life in Cowtown

The longest wait in the world is finally over!

The tomatoes are starting to ripen!!!

At first it was just the cherries:

And now it’s even the big guns:

I don’t think I can convey just how thrilled I am. I am prouder than a mother hen, given how just long this has taken. Seriously, these tomatoes have a world record for a delayed harvest. I started my seedlings on a cold winter day which is indelibly marked in my mind – March 22.  (Next year January?) Then I had to wait and wait and wait and wait, and April, May, June, July AND August rolled by. I was wondering if I got some sort of developmentally challenged tomatoes, and with deep envy I read all the posts of abundant harvests in the blogosphere.

But it looks like a warm September is giving them a bit of a chance, and they are finally, FINALLY almost ready for harvest. I know this season has sucked across the continent, with battles of drought, excess rain, late spring, late blight and clearly late growth, and I’m not getting a bumper crop by any stretch, but the thrill of seeing these babies ripen on the wine makes up for all the worrying and waiting.

Taste tests coming up!

It seems shockingly hard to believe, but fall is almost upon us. This summer has been brief, cool and restless, blowing snow across the prairies and beaming hot sun upon our heads all within a week. Poor plants hardly know what to do with themselves, and my co-worker has daylilies that haven’t opened up yet. It’s the end of August, and that speaks for itself.

 In my garden all the flowers are shedding their last blooms, throwing off seeds and fluff and enjoying their last few weeks of light. Here’s some Friday photos of my last fall flowers.

For me fall is always bittersweet. On one hand it’s a beautiful season with everything changing colors and dressing up in striking yellows, reds and oranges, and on the other hand it’s the sadness of shorter days, the first hints of frost in the air, and the dying of the greens as they prepare for their long hibernation.  I’d take summer over any other season any day, but if I lived in the land of summer, I’d have to put up with year round spiders! So I don’t.

My gardening ignorance knows no bounds, so for the longest time I wondered how exactly are tomatoes appear on the vine? I know this is a trite question to preoccupy my mind with, what with all the thinking I could be doing about world peace and the nature of happiness and all, but occupy me it did.

Normally I turn to Google to solve my quandaries, but for some reason, in this case the effort proved worthless. Experienced gardeners already knew the answer, and all I could find was chipperly ignorant answers from other first time gardeners. (Speaking of, I drove by a church readerboard the other day that proclaimed “Google does NOT have all the answers.” I guess that proves them right. Made me laugh.)

For weeks while I waited for something, anything to happen with the tomatoes who were flowering leisurely, I circled the plants like a hungry shark waiting for some sign of a bulge. Would it come from behind the flower like a cucumber?  Would it form inside the flower itself? I didn’t want to miss the moment that would answer this cruicial question so every day I checked for the telltale little green ball that would tell me my efforts would be rewarded.

And when finally, my first plant, the Black Prince, decided to reward my patience, and I had my answer. So I thought I’d share it with anyone else who may be wondering how exactly the magic happens and where to look for it next time. And then the photo turned out blurry. And then I cried. But I’ll post it anyway, because a crappy photo still solves the mystery once and for all. The flower wilts, people, wilts! And from BEHIND the wilted flower the tomato starts peeking out. First as a teeny little pea, and rather quickly grows to a large orange that proceeds to turn lighter and lighter until allegedly, it begins to ripen. But I’ll try and take a photo of that as it happens. Does it start on top? Side?…