Let's call the whole thing off

So guess what these plants are?

This little area between the front porch and the side porch used to be where we kept our garbage and recycling cans. There were four of them, two trash and two recycling, lined up front to back, and they sat on top of a whole bunch of what I assumed to be weeds.

Now, what you have to understand (and I really should have taken a "before" photo to illustrate this) is that these plants were NOT staked up , as they are shown in the photo. I did that after I discovered what they were. Before, they were all laying down and matted into the ground by the trash cans. Which the previous tenants had put there, by the way. So I don't feel I should be ridiculed too much for not recognizing initially that, amongst the clover and other assorted weeds, we have two very much alive and very actively fruiting tomato plants!

My mom was over two weekends ago, and why were we outside? I guess we were playing with Nolan and his tricycle, or she was getting in her car to leave, I don't really remember, and my mom knelt down and said, "Carrie, these are tomato plants!" I was all Scooby-Doo with my "Hurh?" I knelt down next to her, and sure enough, there were little green globes hanging from some of the branches.

The plants were practically on the verge of being run over by the car, so far out into the driveway had they protruded, and since I thought they were weeds, I hadn't really thought to do much about it.

But yes, they are tomatoes, and so I went inside and found some cheapie old brass curtain rods, pulled off the little finials, shoved them into the ground and tied the plants up to them. Then I dug all the weeds out with a cultivator and threw out some of the assorted trash and debris that had collected there because of the trash cans.

God know how these things got there, since I'm given to understand that tomatoes generally aren't perennials, and I certainly wasn't doing anything to take care of them in any way. Until now. Maybe the previous tenants planted them long ago, and the trash ooze leaking from the cans helped to fertilize them? I don't know.

So I went to the Home Despot and got a couple tomato cages and some vegetable fertilizer. Trying to shove the quite-mature plants into the tomato cages did not work very well, however, and in the end I gave up after only getting one of them into a cage, with much accidental breaking of stems and crushing of flowers and the glaven.

So who knows? Maybe in a few weeks we'll have tons of tomaters and a crushing need for my mother-in-law's fabulous Cream of Tomato Soup recipe. Or mabye we'll get a few stunted runty tomatoes and the rest will be killed by some bug that I don't know enough about gardening to prevent.

But in the meantime, yay! Tomatoes!

Thanks for reading.