Day 234
Well, the day has finally come … the day when, alas, I have picked the last tomato from the vine. I could have given it another week … but our nights have been quite chilly and, knowing me and gardening at this time of year, I probably would have forgotten about it had I left it any longer and it would have fallen off, rotten, some day not too long from now.
So, though a little, hard, green globe … I plucked it from the vine.
I don’t know who was more upset to see the end of tomato season – me or Gertie.
Gertie, at 7 years old, is my youngest pug and pet. And, she is BY FAR the veggie lover of the group.
There have been times in the past when I had to rig a fence around my tomatoes. And sometimes the fencing did nothing but get in her way as she forged through like a little fat rhino to pluck the cherry tomatoes off the vine … leaving the entire lower half of all the bushes chomped clean!
This year, my tomatoes were in pots … so, elevation was on my side with the vines growing a bit higher on the cages. But there’d still be those days when she’d be outside, standing next to the tomato plants, eyeballing those red orbs, whimpering, crying or barking. I don’t know if she was hoping that the sound waves would make those tasty treats fall from the vines … or if she was barking for me to come help her get one off! I learned to recognize the bark … something akin to Lassie’s “Timmy’s down the well”!
(Funny … that family didn’t have enough sense to stay away from the well but they could decipher the barks of their dog! Go figure.)
Anyway … no more tomatoes. Well, not ripe ones anyway. I have about 7 small green golfballs sitting on my kitchen counter. I will chop them up for Gert as they ripen as a treat in her morning breakfast bowl.
But no more for ME. A very sad day … because if you are a tomato-lover (as am I – even though I am allergic to them!) … you know that NO store tomato compares to a homegrown one. Not even close!
So, as fall arrives I will be, once again, relegated to purchasing tomatoes from the grocery store … the ones that taste almost like cardboard or more precisely wet cardboard even though they claim they are “on the vine”.
I said it before but John Denver was right when he sang, “Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes … what would life be without homegrown tomatoes? Only two things that money can’t buy and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.”
Gertie is a very wise dog!