There will be tomatoes on my vines, somehow

I don’t want much out of my patio gardening this year. Just a tomato or two off my own vine will be fine.

That’s probably the best I can hope for since that’s the only veggie I have planted. I fear the worst I can hope for is a larger water bill and no tomatoes.

I’ve got one plant in a great big pot at the end of the patio and the other is in a spot I prepared next to the patio alongside the trellis.

The one in the pot is a hybrid slicer tomato and the vine went crazy immediately. I decided to tie it up to a thin pole instead of a tomato cage. It flowered like crazy and even set a few tomatoes onto the vine. It was going so well I decided I better pinch it back a little bit (prune it) to make it set fruit.

That didn’t seem to make a lot of difference but I did manage to break one of the main branches that did have a good tomato on it.

Fighting the urge to take up my Granddad Ruby’s method of swatting the plant during the middle of the day with a flyswatter to pollinate, I instead decided to sit back and let Mother Nature take its course.

It did all right. A tomato worm found the vine. He’s been busy cutting the tips off my vine and I haven’t been able to locate the rascal yet.

The other vine, which I thought was a heirloom cherry tomato, really began putting on fruit in the meantime. I kept watching and those darned cherry tomatoes just kept getting bigger. Some of them are the size of hen’s eggs now and nothing has ripened. I looked down in the bed one day next to the base of the vine and picked up the little plastic ID stick and it says I have a yellow pear tomato.

Those yellow tomatoes look like my best chance now for enjoying the fruits of my labor, but they’re still pretty green and that danged tomato worm has moved over onto that vine.

I’m not sure if my tomatoes can be saved and I’m not too sure about enjoying a petunia and marigold salad.

Tonight in the supermarket I bought those good tomatoes with the vine still attached. I don’t believe my wife saw me slip them into the vegetable crisper. Tomorrow before she rises I’ll tie those tomatoes onto my vines and ask her to go out and pick me one

No matter how you pronounce it, or whether you call it a fruit or a vegetable, that tomato will have come off of my vine — sort of.