Pass the cigars!

Aidan and I were out in the garden yesterday evening inspecting our tomato plants for the dreaded green horned caterpillars of death - our pet name for the hornworms that seem to love our garden. Aidan is better at finding them than I am and much less squeamish, so I let him root through the tomato plants searching for the fat green buggers. Then he screams "A BABY MATER!" and he's jumping up and down pointing at a tiny green ball on one of our tomato plants. Holy crap. We did it. A plant produced fruit in our garden. It is a real live baby tomato.

To anyone who's ever successfully grown anything before, this seems quite mundane. I read the other gardening blogs where people need help from their neighbors to help them haul in their massive loads of vegetables and then they're canning and freezing and cooking to use everything up before it goes bad. I do realize how pathetic our excitement is about our one tiny pea-sized green tomato. But understand that we planted this garden in July and it's October now and this is the first actual fruit that's come from a flower in our garden. I have low confidence that this tiny little green tomato will turn into something edible, but it gives us hope. I assure you, we were low on hope before this.

And did you see what's next to our baby tomato? Two more little yellow flowers, giving us more hope that they'll turn into baby tomatoes too. I knew when we started our garden - and this blog - that there was a chance we'd fail, but I never dreamed it would be as hard as it is to get things to grow. We have another tomato plant that looks very weird and as I thumb through the Organic Gardening book I realize it looks like every picture in there. I have diagnosed it with 6 different viral strains, 4 bacteria and about 12 insect infestations. That is proof that Gardening Without Skills is not an easy task. But we did it. Somehow we got one tiny little tomato to grow.

Hoo.

Ray.