One Towering Tomato

To the left at two feet ( approx. 61 cm) tall, tomato ‘Legend,’ to the right at three feet (approx. 91 cm), tomato ‘Cherokee Purple,’ and in the center at a whopping seven feet (approx. 213 cm) tall, tomato ‘Gardener’s Delight!’ Holy cow! Thanks Adam Leone of http://carrottopsallotment.com/  for suggesting ‘Gardener’s Delight.’

There are many ways to grow tomatoes. Some people tie them to a single stake, some let them sprawl over the ground, and some like me give them each a cage of their own, tucking stray shoots here and there in passing. If there was a year to listen to old garden hands that say to snip out the wayward suckers to promote fruit over foliage, this was it, but I never even got around to mulching. Having the tomatoes top the cage is not an uncommon sight late in the season, but there’s a whole lot of season to go here in Wisconsin. Gardener’s Delight seems to demand a second cage. The raccoons are giving it a two paws up. The rude buggers eat half of each ripe tomato and leave the other half to rot. I gave my first full sized tomato from ‘Legend’ to My Love’s mom, the raccoons got the next two and I resorted to picking them just under ripe and letting them ripen in the house so I could have some for myself.

There’s been another “helper” in the tomato patch.

The infamous tobacco hornworm here to help with the pruning. I caught this guy, but there’s another out there lurking in the jungle of my tomato cage devouring what he can while he can. It has been a buggy year with variegated cutworms drilling into peony buds, tarnished plant bugs making daylily buds fall off, corn borers boring into lily stalks, and Japanese beetles gorging on nearly everything else. Still, despite the drought and the bugs and the raccoons and the deer (eating buds off my daylilies), we live in a kind of paradise with genuine amber waves of grain. I hope your garden paradise is just as joyful.

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