It’s not just my thumb that’s green.

Everyone tells me this is the “best” tomato season, but since I didn’t plant any, I figured I’d never know.  All I bought were three small zucchini plants at our local farmer’s market.  Right away the raccoons ripped them apart, but somehow I managed to salvage two of them, put them in clay pots and hide them away from where the raccoons go till they were big enough to fend for themselves.

I also used some kind of MiracleGro blue granules to feed them about once a week.  Probably I overdid it, because I’m one of those types of people who just throws in a dash of this and a splash of that when I’m cooking.  So I just poured what I thought looked like the right amount of MiracleGro into my gallon-container gardening can, filled it up with water and fed my plants and flowers.

Strangely, my tiny zucchinis started to go crazy, producing zuc after zuc, all with the loveliest yellow blossoms.  (In fact, I’ve now become quite an expert at making fried squash blossoms that are killer!)

But even that isn’t the really weird part.  I noticed a small plant growing near the one zucchini plant that was in the ground.  At times I thought it was a weed and had been tempted to pull it, but I decided to let it grow a bit until I could tell what it was.  What it was – and is – is a tomato plant.  Not just any tomato plant, but a “Little Shop of Horrors” ‘Feed me, Seymour’-kind of tomato plant. You DO remember the Audrey 2, don’t you?

Well, my Audrey 2 hasn’t just grown.  It has engulfed our backyard – overshadowing the zucchini plant and anything else in its way.  When I showed it to some friends a few weeks ago, one of them asked me if I was feeding it.  “Yes,” I said. “I feed it about once a week.”

“Well, stop,” he said.

I suppose that would have been smart, but I didn’t.

So good ol’ Audrey 2 has been rapidly growing and growing – and producing a whole lot of little teeny, tiny green tomatoes.  I’ve been ecstatic….for weeks now.  But the beach weather in good ol’ Aptos where I live hasn’t exactly been cooperating.  It’s been dreary, overcast, with an occasional burst of sunshine.  So my tomats are still…..green.

I could have been more patient but for the fact that we’ve had a month-long trip planned for the past year.  It wasn’t changeable.  And while we’re gone, our landscape guy is going to drag in a whole bunch of dirt and get our yard ready for a whole new look which we’ll start planting as soon as we get home.

So today I had the very unhappy experience of ripping out Audrey 2, pulling off the puny little green tomatoes, and hacking the rest of the plant to death.  It wasn’t a pretty sight, to say the least.

Yet…..I have hope.  As fate would have it, a gardening article a week ago said that if your tomatoes are still green and you have to pick them, here’s what you do:  Wrap each one separately in a sheet or two of newspaper, put them in a box or bin of some kind, cover them, put them under your bed and leave them there until Christmas!

I kid you not.

So that’s what I did.  The box is already stashed away, we’ll be heading out on our trip soon, and I’m not going to worry about my little ‘volunteer’ Audreys anymore.  I’ll be envy of everyone around when I bring out delicious-looking salads with red-red tomatoes that actually TASTE like tomatoes!

Either than, or I’ll have a smelly bin of rotten ones.

I’m going with the first alternative.  🙂