When I looked out to the backyard this morning, I was struck by our volunteer tomato plant.
It started coming up pretty late, and we didn’t put it there. This bed is mostly empty this year (except for a couple of pepper plants and some marigolds) and frankly, we didn’t think it would actually do anything.
And really, it hasn’t, except dwarf the pepper plants (which provided a smidge of shade in the hot afternoons, and helped the bed retain some moisture). It fruited, producing a few — not pleasantly edible — rock-hard tomato “berries.”
But it is the middle of October, and it’s still doing this:
I haven’t seen any bees in the last week or so, and this plant is still pumping out flowers like it’s on a mission.
I mean, I suppose it is… a very desperate mission, at this point.
I’ll be taking out the garden plants over the next week (it’s taken this long for our daytime temps to get below 75 degrees), but I’m pretty amazed at the tenacity of this rough-and-tumble volunteer tomato.
Carmen Yount 