My potatoes are growing tomatoes!

Granted I still have a lot to learn about gardening, but what I saw the other day confused me and made me doubt what knowledge I have picked up along the way. I was watering the garden and admiring the gigantic bushy potato plants that have overtaken the scenery in one of my raised beds when a little something caught my eye. I leaned in and saw a little green tomato that had fallen off one of my tomato plants and landed on my potato plant.


I remember having a fleeting thought about how strange it was that a little green tomato had fallen upward about 12 inches from where it was growing - and over one full garden bed to land on my potato plant. I thought it was bizarre so I reached out to grab it and chuck it on the ground. When I grabbed a hold of it, the thing was stuck and not laying loosely on a leaf like I expected. Obviously some sort of vine had wrapped around it so I looked at the stem of the little tomato to see why it wasn't moving. Turns out it was stuck because the TOMATO WAS GROWING OUT OF MY POTATO PLANT.

And when I looked deeper, there were little tomatoes growing all over on my potato plant. You can't imagine the thoughts that ran through my mind. What had I done? Had I inadvertently created a new species of plant by violating some plant law and planting potatoes and tomatoes too closely? Why wasn't this in the gardening book? Were there tomato seeds in my compost that had morphed with my seed potatoes? Had my lack of gardening skills led me to single-handedly mess with Mother Nature, possibly causing some horrible potmato hybrid to take over the world?


So I came inside and called Farmer B and my mom right away. They both had the same startled reaction and doubted my sanity and my discovery. So I did a quick internet search to see if anyone else had created such an abomination or if there was some sort of number I should call to turn myself in to the proper agricultural authorities. I was relieved and surprised that a lot of people have found tomatoes growing from their potatoes and were equally surprised by them.

Turns out this is normal. The round green cherry-tomato-looking fruit actually are the fruit of the potato plant and not real tomatoes. We eat the tuber, but the fruit is what the plant produces, complete with seed in there for growing future plants (although I read that these plants can be iffy, so best to start with seed potatoes and not actual seeds). The potato and the tomato are both in the nightshade family, which explains why the fruits look similar. However, they're poisonous, so you don't want to chop one up and put it in your salad and you might want to tell your kids to leave them alone.

Phew. I could walk free another day.

The remnants

I slogged out to the garden after it started to drain and decided to pull out any survivors before they turned into a yellow, soggy slimy mess. I was very sad to see some of my strongest, greenest most promising plants reduced to yellow leafless sticks, but at least I've learned that I do have the ability to grow some of these things now. Although this garden ended in death and destruction (again) I've discovered an entire list of vegetables that I can keep alive (until a flood, of course), so I definitely got a tiny boost of gardening confidence this time around.

My Giant Musselburgh Leeks were not looking too happy to be floating in the muck so I pulled out the strongest ones. The other ones, only the size of scallions, will be coming out tomorrow if they haven't already succumbed to the pit of despair. But there was a light at the end of the gardening tunnel. I got 1 lb, 11 oz of leeks from the garden! I was quite happy with that because they were planted in October of last year and have been my longest-growing vegetable yet. I'll definitely plant some more of these later this Fall.


I made a delicious heaping portion of Leek and Potato Soup with these leeks and it was divine. When Farmer B was at work I poured a heaping bowl for myself for lunch with the leftovers and savored it while the boys munched down peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I then looked surprised when he came home and found there was none left.

The tomatoes actually surprised me. Granted a huge portion cracked completely open and were inedible, but I managed to save 6 lbs, 1 oz of them. They were bright red and everything you'd hope for in a home-grown tomato - sweet, juicy and bursting with flavor. I have about another 5 ounces on the patio right now ripening, but the rest are history. Because it can't hurt, I pruned up the remaining tomato plants just incase they recover.


Since I have so many tomatoes that are ripe and ready to be eaten, I've picked a couple of recipes that will help me put them to good use. The first recipe is Avocado, Tomato and Mango salsa that will be whipped up tomorrow for lunch and seems like the perfect summer salsa to go with my new organic corn tortilla chips. The second recipe is a Tomato Cucumber Salad with Mint. My mint plant has a never-say-die attitude, so I feel like I owe it to him to use him in as many recipes as I can.

So although I missed out on most of the yummy vegetables that I had dreamed of, I did get a few things on the table, which was a huge step up from last year. I'll take what I can get at this point!

TOMATO WOE - a limerick

TOMATO WOE - a limerick

My first ripe tomato turned red
But it developed a crack on its head
Then a bird ate its skin
Before I could dig in
And now I'm eating some store bought's instead.


Seriously - am I not meant to enjoy a mater from my garden? I haven't had any watering issues (up until this week's torrential downpours) so I don't know how the damn thing cracked. And this morning - THIS morning - was the morning I had put aside to pick the tomato. My first ripe tomato. I had fresh turkey and cheese and a hoagie put aside just for this morning's first tomato. And wouldn’t you know that a bird decided to peck at the damn thing right before I got there. A garden is definitely a lesson in patience...and humility.

Woe is me.

Need advice for rogue tomato plants

Last time we planted I didn't have the pleasure of consuming one lousy tomato, despite having an entire row of tomato plants. If you've been with me long enough you'll remember that I had some "minor" (okay major) watering issues, which led to every single tomato cracking open on the stem. After the season was over I got rid of every plant in the garden and Farmer B tilled the garden so that we could replant.

I was out in the garden over the weekend and discovered the oddest thing. There are strange little weeds growing all over the garden that look a lot like tomato plants. I inspected them closer. I rubbed the leaves. They smelled like tomato plants. They even have little yellow flowers on them. I have rogue maters all over the garden!!


Is life continuing with complete disregard for my black thumb??? Did last season's plants want to live so badly that they hid out in my soil just waiting for the perfect time to sprout again? If this works out we WILL get to eat some of the tomatoes from our first tomato plants - even if it is one season later!

We counted about 10 little rogue tomatoes today. Some are in good spots and will probably continue to grow just fine, but some are in horrible spots, like right under other plants, namely our Jack Be Little Pumpkins.


What should I do? Is there a safe way to dig up these plants and move them? If there is, how do I dig up ones that are right up against another plant? I know that hard core gardeners would probably say to just dig them all up and chuck 'em in the compost heap. But you know that I want to save anything that has a zest for life in my garden. Purposely killing something that's growing in my garden goes against my gardening creed.


Does anyone have any advice for me? And if you're kind enough to give advice, please remember that I'll need specifics if I'm going to pull this off. I've never dug up a plant in the garden and moved it, so this will be a first for me. Anything dug up in my garden ends up in the compost bin, so I am completely new to this endeavor. I want to save these tomatoes though so I'm asking for help if anyone's willing to give it.

A Halloween Scalping

I had family visiting over Halloween weekend so I took a nice break away from the computer. It was really nice to have family in town and the boys loved the attention. One of these family members is my Aunt Jill - she's one of those long-time gardeners who knows what's she's doing and has more mad skills than she knows what to do with. She even has a greenhouse and knows how to use it. She's got one of those English country gardens that you see in magazines and romantic movies with gorgeous big blooms and bees darting from patch of color to patch of color. It's really quite sick. The downside is that since she's from England (as are all of my family) there are some different growing conditions between England and Florida - obviously. But she still taught me more in one day than I've learned in the past 5 months.

We walked out in the garden together and she eyeballed each of my plants and then asked me for my secateurs. I, of course, stared at her dumbly and after much discussion we figured out that it's the English term for handheld pruning shears. I gave her the shears so she could prune up a few things and came in the house to tend to the boys.

When I walked back out to the garden I literally felt ill. I never thought any gardening incident could cause my heart to pound in my chest like I was watching an intense horror flick, but it did. My tomato plants were in the middle of a scalping of epic proportions. The pile of discarded tomato parts and severed limbs was enormous, and where my bushy plants had once thrived were little green naked sticks inside tomato cages. I wanted to knit them little cozies to wear because they looked so sad and exposed.

My aunt saw the look of pure horror on my face and spent the next 20 minutes reassuring me that she had done the right thing. She told me that my tomato plants were full of "sucker shoots" that grow off the main shoots but do not produce flowers, but merely take the goodness from the plant. She also showed me that one tomato plant that happens to have one strong main stalk has 3 very large green tomatoes, but that the plants with 8 or 9 stalks have lots of tiny cherry-sized tomatoes. She assured me that if I would keep them pruned (preferably from the get-go) that I'd end up with bigger fruit and less useless crap and small tomatoes.
Just when I was getting used to the idea, Farmer B strolled up. His chin hit his chest and he stood there mouth agape for a very long time. Yeah, I was there 20 minutes ago - I knew how he felt. It was quite funny.
Then she told me that some of my problems were probably coming from caterpillars. I assured her that I don't have caterpillars anymore since I've inspected the plants for days and haven't found any. She then pulled some off my peppers and tomatoes and well…what could I say? She is a gardening genius in my world and I felt quite honored to have been scalped by a pro.

(Oh and if you're wondering why my tomatoes look a bit yellow in the photos, I accidentally left the sprinkler on again - for about 14 hrs. Don't tell Farmer B. I didn't. He was very understanding the first time...but...I'm sure I'd get that look and a discussion about how much the well pump cost the second time around.)

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.

Holy Hornworms

I was doing my morning plant inspection in the garden when I noticed a vile looking green creature hanging from the bottom of a branch on one of our tomato plants.

Next to this thing was a leaf with all these gross looking brown egg-things on it - which might also be some sort of insect poo. Blech! I took off that leaf, smashed it into our fence and tossed it far away into the neighbor's yard (he has no plants and he's a single guy so I knew he wouldn't care). Then we looked at the vile green creature and tried to figure out if it was good or bad for the plants.

Farmer B decided it must be evil since the branch it was hanging from didn't have any leaves on it, so the green thing must have eaten them. We removed the branch from the plant and the boys spent a good bit of time oogling it.

Then came the whole "what do we do with this thing?" question. I didn't really want to step on it. The idea of its guts spewing out didn't appeal to me. So…we tossed it into the other neighbor's yard. This is a vacant house with no plants either. I realize we sound very un-neighborly, but our lots are about 2 acres and it just made us realize we need a plan for disposing of future garden beasties. Seriously what do you DO with a big green bug? Do gardeners really take the things to their front driveway and step on them? We will come up with a plan for future bug disposal because we realize that these creatures will probably just find a way back to our garden. We kept them very far away from a rear neighbor who actually has a vegetable garden, so we did try to do the right thing. Plus, stepping on it in front of the boys who were clearly amused by it seemed kind of wrong too.

Then I moseyed over to the pumpkin plant and found a small one of these disgusting things on a very-chewed up leaf. Now I wonder how many of these things are hidden in the garden?

So we came inside and whipped out our Organic Gardening book and flipped through disgusting page after disgusting page until we found it. It's a Tomato Hornworm. I suppose this is extremely common to anyone who's had a garden before, but as you know, this is uncharted territory for us. Apparently these things burrow into the soil, so I wonder how we got them with a new garden? Maybe one of the moths flew over to our garden at some point? To get rid of them you're supposed to hand-pick them off (yuck) or get wasps to come and eat them. It says ladybugs do a number on them too. I'll work on the wasp brigade soon.