The Tomato Wars

My husband, John, noticed many bird-sown tomato plants just outside of our back garden, near the fence we grew tomatoes on the year before. He saw them because the surrounding large trees had been removed months earlier and so they grew exposed to the sunlight without anyone caring for them. This happened right around the time my sister died in February, when my head was turned by my grief. It was something I wanted to write about but was too sad to do it at that time and with only a couple of weeks left in our summer down under we had to hurry to put these babies in the ground. But they were already covered in tiny green cherry tomatoes.
So, he dug them up from the hard-packed, very dry soil, which seemed to take ages. The highlight for him was relocating a real tomato tree, as he named the largest of them that was about 3 feet high. That one was studded with fruit hanging from it.
The first few nights after planting were cool even though the days were on the sunny side and warm enough to mature our bounty. But suddenly frosts threatened so I figured out a makeshift system using garbage bags to cover these plants well enough to ward off the freezing on the leaves. So, we did manage somehow to get a harvest of sorts which I used in salads or just popped into my mouth. Some of these first picks made it to the kitchen sill to soak in the rays of the days behind glass, for them to turn red. Eventually that happened but the weather turned really cold and the nights dropped below freezing and eventually even the covered plants suffered. Our autumn days started off like winter and that was a bridge too far for these fragile tomato plants. In the end, the cold defeated our plan to stretch the harvest period further into the middle of the year. If we’d had a greenhouse that would have worked of course, but lacking that I made the difficult decision to pull the unripe little guys off their lodgings by their stalks.
Now they are resting comfortably in our lounge garden window as there were too many for our kitchen ledge. Way too many. And they do ripen in the windows with a bit of protection from the cold inside.
But it takes a while. And although the frost won in the end, it doesn’t matter because we’ve got so many tomatoes to enjoy. So, well done John. Thank you for this unexpected gift that put a few smiles on my face.