Tomatoes from scratch (2)

This is not a cooking post, but rather musings about my vegetable garden. And perhaps someday if actual edible vegetables grow from my garden it can become a post about cooking, but until then, these are just plants.

So here are my 3 lovely tomato plants. The first one is the plant that was featured in an earlier blog post. It has 3 tomatoes growing on it now!

Here is a picture of the only tomato plant that had to actually be tethered to the supportive stake. The other two plants just seemed to naturally grow toward the stake. I guess that makes this plant the rebel among them:


And finally the runt of the litter:

Is that an appropriate term for plants? I have no idea.

Now, you can't tell because of my amazing zoom-in abilities but these are not quite award winning tomatoes yet. The biggest one is maybe the size of a quarter. Maybe. Maybe if the sun hits it just right.

Now on to my pumpkin plant. These flowers are huge. My neighbor this morning told me that I could actually cut the flowers off and stir fry them. Yes... okay, but then where would the pumpkins grow? Strangely I have never seen these 2 flowers open. Something tells me that is a bad sign, but only time will tell. And if the flowers do open I have a whole new set of problems on my hands:


Recently some family was visiting from Montana and they have quite a bit of gardening knowledge. I took them on a tour of my flowering garden and asked them if each flower would turn into a pumpkin the same way that each tomato flower had turned into a tomato. No such luck. Apparently flowers in the squash family are either male or female (unlike tomato flowers which have both parts). The flowers that I have so far are only male flowers. If female flowers show up I have to go out there one evening with a bottle of wine and a paint brush and make some magic (if you know what I mean).

And I thought I had it all figured out with just the birds and the bees. There is nothing like learning from family (while in your 30s) that the saying really should have been "The birds and the bees... and the squash family of plants... oh and cantalopes!" (see below)


This flower just appeared this week. Is this a girl flower? Does it look female to you?

I have a neighbor who watches me go out back and check on the plants every night. I can't wait to see what he says to me when he sees me go back there with a violin, a bottle of wine and a paint brush. And whatever he says, I can promise you that I will have no response.