Tomatoes and other thoughts

I'm just starting to get ripe tomatoes. I did plant late, but it's been so hot this summer, the tomatoes just wouldn't set. Finally, our monsoon has arrived, but two months late, and we're getting lots of wonderful rain. Ahh, the petrichor! And everything is looking rather lush. Plus the Rio Grande has water in it! It's been bone dry for weeks, thanks to the climate-change hoax.

My local GreenMarket still has lotsa tomatoes. I am still buying two pints of little yellow cherry toms (SunGold?) that are just impossibly ripe and sweet; and however many heirlooms I like. Today it was Brandywine, Indigo Blue, Speckled Roman, and Cherokee purple.

I've got a sheet of puff pastry and some ricotta-pesto ready to make a tart.

[Jenise]

Our tomato season hasn't been good. I gave up growing my own this year.

Best year I ever had, and this was sometime back, I grew four different heirlooms and one Early Girl in my courtyard. Vines were covered in fruit but they were late ripening and I picked the first tomato on September 11th. On September 12th we went to Europe. When we got back three weeks later the vines were black and shrivelled, fruit picked over by birds. The last few years I grew them in my sunnier back yard which faces the Salish Sea. My tomatoes were one month later in ripening than The Tomato Guy's six miles east of me. And his were sweeter, fuller tasting--even when it was the same variety like Brandywines. So I gave up and decided that I'm just going to be a good customer of The Tomato Guy from now on. But he had a bad year this time: cooler than normal temps introduced powdery mildew early on, and he got hit with another blight. I went to buy tomatoes a few days ago and found him there, drill in hand, taking down the stand.

Yesterday I bought more at the Farmers Market, and there won't be any more available after this. It's 52 F outside as I type.