We grown tomatoes for nearly thirty years. The ones that our garden is producing this year are unlike any that I've ever seen. The picture to the right is actually one of the more photogenic of the tomatoes that I have picked.
Many of them look much worse. Of course beauty is only skin deep. The tomatoes are absolutely delicious. There is more waste than usual, but considering we're swamped in them right now, I'm not worrying about a little extra waste.
It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote a post, "The bitter tomato harvest," and complained about marauding deer and some sort of disease that was attacking the plants.
I was close to pulling the plants up, but I decided to fertilize them and nurse them through the drought. I thought we were going to have a super fall harvest, but the deer were back last week and came close to destroying the plants once again.
We're going to have more ugly tomatoes than we can eat for the next few weeks, but I've decided that we're going to give our tomato patch a well deserved rest. I'll work some new soil and manure into it, and perhaps just keep it stirred up for the next couple of years. Whe we plant tomatoes the next time, there will be a fence.
Next year I'll find a spot to plant a few tomatoes at the NC coast. Maybe the deer aren't so plentiful down there.
Still I am glad that I didn't give up on the plants this year. It would have been our first crop failure. Once you peel and slice the tomatoes, you have a plate of the most beautiful deep red tomatoes that you have ever seen. I can live with that. They're pretty close despite their ugliness to the ones I wrote about last year in "The best tomato sandwich of the season."
