Dear Constant Reader,
Gardening brings me joy. I’ve always grown herbs and when we moved into The Manor, added fruit. Over the past several years, I’ve branched out into vegetables and wild flowers.
For a long time I had a composter in a corner of the yard. I would chuck all our scraps into it, but never tended it very well (it didn’t get enough sun, I was bad about keeping the ratio of green to brown, &c.). It was a good way of keeping egg shells and carrot peels out of the trash, but I never got much compost from it.
Earlier this year, we joined the city food waste collection program. Because it’s composting on an industrial scale, we can actually send them any kind of food that would otherwise go into the garbage, not just fruit & veggie scraps. So, I decided to retire our composter. I dumped out the compost-ish stuff in the corner of the yard by the grape arbor, so I could clean the bin and offer it up on our local gardening swap group.
As I was planting the rest of my gardens in the spring, I noticed what looked like tomato plants sprouting up where the composter used to be. Before I knew it, there was a veritable thicket of tomato plants all tangled around each other, plus a pumpkin vine adding to the chaos. By the time I realized I ought to stake them or something, it was too late. It was a tomato jungle.
The plants are mostly creeping along the ground and there are so many green tomatoes.
Every morning I go out and walk around the gardens, checking on everything. Then I wade into the tomato wilds, looking for ripe or almost ripe tomatoes to pick and nestle into my little basket (which I made, of course). I feel like someone with free-range chickens, looking for where those darn hens laid their eggs this time.
They’re mostly little tomatoes, which makes sense. We tend to buy grape tomatoes, so that’s then main kind of seeds that would have ended up in the compost. However, I can see a few big ones lurking hither and yon. I’m hoping they ripen before it gets too cold, but there’s nothing wrong with fried green tomatoes!
There’s also a pumpkin! Of course it’s the one that’s growing wildly from seed that’s bigger and heartier than the one intentionally planted in my garden. This is an old picture from when it was just a feral baby pumpkin. Right now it’s big enough that I needed to support it by slipping it into an old stocking that’s tied to the fence, which doesn’t make for an aesthetic photo.
And just today I discovered what appear to be tomatillos…
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Oh, The Glamourous Life! 