Volunteer Tomato Gives All

During the summer I’ve subjected my Facebook friends to a short series of photos of a volunteer Roma tomato plant that had taken up residence in a window well on the south side of our house. For posterity’s sake, I will now commit (and finish) this story into the permanence of cyberspace on my Coeli et Terra blog.

In early summer I noticed, through the plastic cover over that window well, a huge green leafy mass filling the space. I removed the cover, and there, much to my surprise, was a somewhat bedraggled tomato plant in need of water and air. I carefully freed its vines and tied them to a stake, later adding adding two more stakes. I put this picture on Facebook...

Someone wondered if a volunteer tomato could/would produce fruit.  It was teasing me with blossoms. ”We’ll see,” I said. From time to time I watered the plant. That was about the extent of my contribution to its health and productivity. By September its fruit was growing under the thick foliage, but it was so thick I had no idea how much fruit might be there. As the tomatoes ripened they tended to fall into the well, making them very hard to retrieve. I practice defensive harvesting, picking tomatoes before they were fully ripe, when I could find them. Harvest was the hardest part of the whole story.

By October I had picked and/or retrieved quite a few tomatoes, and they were beautiful. When I posted this picture and wondered what to do with all the still-green tomatoes on the vines, people suggested fried green tomatoes and Kosher dill tomatoes.

The plant was beginning to look a little tired. It had worked very hard in the hot sun for three long months. It still hid most of its bounty from me, I being afraid to paw through the vines too much out of fear of breaking them.

On October 29, Frankenstorm’s rain falling and winds picking up, I decided tomato-growing season was over. With regret I cut and yanked out the vines, pulled the remaining tomatoes off, and replaced the cover over the window well. Maxine counted 70 tomatoes of various sizes and stages of ripeness. I think my volunteer tomato produced at least 100 tomatoes this year.

That for which I did nearly nothing did very well. The tomatoes I nurtured from seeds nearly died and didn’t produce a thing because I had no idea what I was doing. The hot house plants I put out in my garden did just okay...maybe 30 tomatoes from about 6 plants.

But the one that was a gift to me and that I just let be...that plant out-produced them all at least three-fold. Sounds like some parables I’ve heard somewhere.