Bittersweet

At this time of year I find it harder to garden. The rewards are great when you harvest (in my opinion) the best crop of all, Tomatoes! The bittersweet part is knowing that soon it will all be over. I have already finished with some of my beds and have begun some clean up. The tomatoes are as always the thing that I wait for all year!

 Heavenly first tomato sandwich of the year!

Quite frankly my tomatoes have me a bit worried. I have been harvesting them for the past couple of weeks but they are mostly tiny guys. They tasted great and that is the main thing.

The thing that worries me is that when I went to water them tonight the plants themselves didn't look great. Kind of shriveled looking. Odd because they were fine on the weekend. The tomatoes look fine with no signs of blight yet but the plants themselves are starting to look really bad and quickly. I am going to take a wait and see attitude until this weekend. If things start to look really bad I guess I will have to pick them all green and ripen them in paper bags.

The seeds were an heirloom type of tomato so maybe that is why. Maybe I have too many plants in a small area with not enough air space? I think next year I will only do four plants so that I can have easy access to each and I think it will be something with a larger tomato. Sad to say I'm not loving the heirloom varieties that I have had.

It will be more clean up this weekend. I notice that there are a few weeds getting out of control that need to be tended to and perhaps another wheelbarrow of manure. I will probably try to harvest my beets, if there are any and do a preliminary clean up. Kind of sad :(

Fingers crossed for my tomatoes.