The End is Near

Well, the garden is starting to give up. I hate to say that. I, after all, am the person who started my seeds in an incubator in the dining room on Groundhog Day, and I would just as soon live in a climate in which I could garden year round. But even I have to admit that things are looking pretty rough out there.

The problem, of course, is that garden plants rarely die all at once, unless there is a hard freeze. So, I have plants that look like they've been put through the wringer, but they have a few viable green tomatoes or some cucumber blossoms or the possibility of a zucchini. I pulled a few this weekend, but I'm not going to pull anything that looks like it might still produce.

One of the amazing plants this year has been the Principe Borghese tomato, which you see in the bowls in the photo taken earlier this summer.  Billed as a drying tomato, it indeed has given me many tomatoes to dry, plus many to eat raw. I've also dumped bowl after bowl of them into sauces and juices, because they are so flavorful. They were the first to be harvested at the end of June, and it looks like they may be my last whenever the vines finally give up.

The amazing thing about these tomatoes is that I understand that they were supposed to be determinate, meaning that they were supposed to set and ripen fruit within a small window to facilitate easier processing.  Instead, they've been steadily producing for two months, and I expect them to go even longer. I can't wait to add up the August garden tallies and see how many pounds I've harvested.

I'm not complaining. As long as these sweet little things are willing to ripen for me, I'll continue to eat them. Every little bit counts.