first ripe tomato

Tonight I harvested the first ripe, red tomato. I had to pull back some branches and dig through the foliage a bit, but there she was. RIPE!


I hope the other tomatoes will follow her lead. I've been soaking the bed once a week. We'll see if that's enough water for the tomato plants.

tomato sacrifice: yellow flowers gotta go

I planted my raised bed on June 11th. That was roughly 103 days ago. The tag on the early girl tomato starts said that it would take about 60 days to bear fruit. So either I completely misread the tag, or something is seriously wrong. Yes, there are tomatoes, lots of tomatoes. Maybe too many tomatoes. But they are not ripe. The plants are still putting out shoots, leaves and lots of new yellow flowers. Why not devote more energy to the existing tomatoes? There are plenty, no need to create more. Let's just grow and ripen the ones that exist now. I'm getting concerned that as we get into the fall, the temperature may drop to the point that the existing tomatoes may never ripen. So I decided to make a sacrifice. For the sake of the existing green tomotoes, I cut off as many yellow flowers as I could find. Here's a bowl full of them. I probably cut twice this many. They smell like tomatoes...


Now hopefully the plants will dedicate their energy to ripen the bounty of tomatoes hanging from their branches! It is really cool to see the developmental process in a single branch. Here you can see the yellow flower, then the mini-green tomato emerging.


One more pic of the green tomatoes...