Thursday, November 08, 2007

Tomatoes (Reprise)

So, you might remember my perennial tomato plant. I bought this plant in the spring of 2006 and have nursed it ever since. Sometime in April 2007, I got sick of having it block my door, so I moved it outside.

Who knew? Turned out the tomato plant loved being outside. It started producing tomatoes like nobody's business. I picked several batches off the thing, and it kept producing. I made tomato bruschetta. I ate tomatoes every morning with my English muffin. I never quite got enough at one time to make tomato sauce--the tomatoes it produces are pretty small, so I'd need a couple dozen at once to make any quantity of sauce--but I think it did pretty well. I always had four or five ripe; twice this summer I had over a dozen ripe at once (hence the bruschetta).

Now it is November, though. The plant it too unwieldy to move back inside, and frankly, there's no point. I am not moving that plant to Seattle with me. It's had a productive, long life. So I have decided to leave it out there to die. But it has been an unusually warm fall; the plant refuses to die. It sits out there, determinedly alive, demanding that I continue watering it.

This weekend, it is supposed to dip below freezing at last. I decided I'd better pick off the last tomatoes. I figure I can make something that calls for green tomatoes, and I don't want them to be spoiled by freezing. I put on my jacket, and went out on the balcony. I picked.


Seriously: 40 tomatoes. 40! Five are ripe, the others green. I think I will make this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thats a lot of tomatoes! But the reci[e looks yummy!

-cass