Saturday, December 11, 2010

The Little Tomato Plant That Could

or, The Champion!

We inherited a tomato plant from a friend who left Kanazawa over the summer.  This tomato plant began having ripe tomatoes in late July (just in time for us to go to the US and miss the harvest, or so we thought), and produced into September.  We hadn't gotten much off it, but it seemed to know that it is an annual, not perennial, and would be destroyed without hesitation the moment it was no longer a contributing member of the household.  It sprouted new flowers as the last few little tomatoes were ready to eat.  Okay, we thought, let's see how far this takes us!

As it began to get cold, the tomato plant was still full of tomatoes of varying stages of ripeness.  We had it out on the porch, sort-of-hoping that the cold would end our involvement with it, but it got later and later in the year and more and more fruit set. Lee caved and brought it inside at the beginning of December, trimmed off the parts the cold had managed to kill and generally cleaned it up.  Now it lives in our sunroom:


As you can see, it is still full of tomatoes.  These pictures were in fact taken on December 10.  Not only are we still getting a perfectly ripe tomato or two daily:


we've also found some new flowers:


Champion tomato-producing plant, we salute you and your struggle to survive against Lee's pruning shears.  We've already decided to start next year's plants off of cuttings from this one - at this rate it will still be producing when those cuttings are fruiting plants themselves.

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