Tomatoes Galore!

Well the growing season is definitely over for this year. My mom helped me strip the last green fruits off the plants last weekend, and I am crossing my fingers that they will deign to ripen. All told I had more than sixty tomatoes from my four plants, but the production was not evenly divided. I had one Early Girl that became the monster of the garden and sort of pushed some of the other plants to the side. It produced MANY smaller fruits with good flavor and a pleasant texture. I also had two "heirloom" varieties that were supposed to produce unusual-looking fruit. One was supposed to be striped and the other was supposed to have dark to black skin. These were a bit of a disappointment. One produced hardly anything, and what did grow was the normal reddish color. The other produced a few very large fruits, but these were bright golden yellow instead of black. The flavor was watery and the texture was actually kind of fibrous and tough. I worked out the math for our garden this year. I believe we spent about $200 on wood for the boxes, soil, plants, stakes, and other goodies. We got about sixty tomatoes, five or six cucumbers, several handfuls of lettuce, ten or twelve onions, and a whole lot of nice flowers. Over all, we probably paid a very high price for our produce, but I am not at all upset. The pleasure I get from doing the gardening is definitely worth the price. The straight-off-the-vine taste is pretty good too.