How Does Our Garden Grow, Part V: Tomatomania!
One lesson we've all learned is that growing a vegetable garden requires patience—and lots of it. While you can wish and hope and plead for plants to grow and fruit to ripen, it's all going to happen on its own time. Case in point: tomatoes. We spend pretty most of July and August staring at the same hard green tomatoes, waiting for some sign that they would ripen. "Any day now" we told ourselves.
Patience, however, is rewarded. First the cherry tomatoes started to turn red, or in the case of the Black Cherry variety, purple. About a week later some color started appearing on the big boys—the Royal Hillbilly and Paul Robeson heirlooms. Now, it's a full-on tomatomania. The plants are churning out more tomatoes than we can eat, so we're giving quite a few away (which are never refused, of course), and finding creative ways to use our late-summer bounty.
Everyone's favorite variety of tomato seems to be the Black Cherry. They're sweet, but with an acidic edge. They're really really good and definitely on the list to grow next year. The Riesentraube cherry tomatoes are very tasty, too, which is a good thing since there are tons of them.