...is not the name of my new cover band. It's what I've got in my back yard, along with 3 grape tomato plants and a CANTALOUPE vine, complete with an actual cantaloupe growing on it. !!!
I found them just the other day (sadly, I did not see them during the actual growing season), and I was stunned! I was like, "Hey, those weeds kind of look like tomato plants. HEY! They ARE tomato plants!" Charis actually picked a ripe tomato yesterday and ate it, and there are dozens more tomatoes that will probably never be red on account of the fact that we're starting to frost here. Stink. The pepper plants (two of them) have buds but no actual peppers, and there is a real, live cantaloupe with about a 6-in diameter growing back there!
Here's the funny thing: the plants that I actually plant, die. These plants have sprung up where our compost pile used to be. The moral of the story? I'm a better gardener when I just throw food on the ground than when I actually tend to and cultivate the plants. Kind of sad.
On a side note: does anyone know if I will be fortunate enough to see the return of these plants in the spring? Or are they just gone, gone, gone when they die for the winter? I could really handle having a supply of peppers, grape tomatoes, and cantaloupe at my disposal.
1 comment:
Volunteer plants (the ones that grow randomly from discarded seeds) are not predictable, and generally grow later in the season. If you let the fruit rot, you may get some other volunteers next year, but it's pretty much the luck of the draw. If you want to harvest the green tomatoes, you can bread them and fry them (a la movie by the same name), or you can wrap them in tissue, store them in a basket in a cool, dry place and check them every once in a while. They will ripen, but they'll taste more like hothouse tomatoes than garden-grown, vine-ripened ones. But, hey, out of season a tomato is a tomato!
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