Monday, May 3, 2010

Anticipation

The garden is teaming with life. All the upside-down tomatoes have blooms and and small tomatoes growing. The Matt's Wild Cherry is covered in small, green, hard, marble like fruits. The Ping Pong Pink has fewer, but larger fruits. The Amish Paste's few fruits are already starting to elongate. And the Sweet 100 is finally starting to get big and has just a couple of itsy bitsy micro-tomatoes forming. The Burpee Big Boy (now called the BBB) has a small fruit on it. The Brandywine is huge, but few blossoms and no fruits yet.

We've got a large bell pepper on one Big Bertha, and few other small bells on the other plants.

Lots of blossoms on the zucchinis. The crook necks have blossoms, but the plants are still on the small side.

The bed cukes are also blooming, but not as large as the upside down cukes. We have tiny little cuke-like growths that are less than 1 inch on most of the plants.

We're dying with anticipation. The garden is filled with all these rock hard baby fruits and it feels like it's been this way for AGES!

RIPEN! RIPEN I SAY! I COMMAND THEE TO RIPEN!!!

Still no okra from Pops. *sigh*

It's steadily getting warmer and warmer, so I hope the heat will bring the ripeness. It's still quite cool at 5:30am (often need a sweater to walk the dogs in the morning. The highs are in the 80's.

At least it's not so hot that we can't enjoy the deck each evening. We're usually out there after getting home. The dogs run amok (Bon even looks like she's yelling "Amok! Amok!" inside her head as she plays leap-frog over Jack - goofy giant puppy), and we chill with a drink and a small cigar. The skeeters aren't too bad, but they're getting a little worse every week. It's nothing a few squirts of OFF! doesn't help. Ed likes to burn a citronella candle. It's one of those nifty coiled up rope candles. I don't know how effective it actually it, but it looks cool. And Ed doesn't seem to be bothered by the bugs as much when it's burning. I don't notice a difference.

So each even, we sit, we smoke, and we try to will the dern plants to ripen through telepathic wishfullness. No luck. And so we wait.....and wait....

Maybe, just as watched pot never boils, a watched tomato never ripens?