Tomato Plants from Hell

Yes, I have tomato plants that, if they had souls, would have already sold them to the devil. There's no other explanation. These things WILL NOT stop producing or even stop growing for that matter!

Let me back up....

In May, I needed to try my hand at vegetables. This year was to be a trial run, so I decided on tomatoes that I would grow in a pot on the back porch. We ended up getting 3 little plants of cherry tomatoes and 3 little plants of bell peppers.

When Dad and Mom came a week later, Dad said that there was no way the tomato plants would do well all together in that pot, that I needed to replant 2 of them. We decided they could go in the flower garden in back (as added greenery) and he, being the wonderful father he is, moved them.

Fast forward to July. The sticks that Shannon and I had initially used to tie the plants weren't big enough, so we drove a couple of bamboo poles into the ground. Even with a lot of twine, we still had to cut off some of the growingly monsterous tomato plant branches off. By the end of July, the plants (in the garden, not the pitiful one in the pot) were a good 4 feet high and even wider for those branches that had escaped the twine. The tomatoes started coming. At first, we'd pick 4 or 5 a day, then a dozen, until mid-August when we were picking upwards of 4 cups of cherry tomatoes a day - remember, from TWO plants. At the end of August, we went away for 8 days and the tomato plants went unpicked (our neighbours all had had their share). When we came back, it was a sea of red. Many tomatoes had ripened and fallen and many, many more were begging to be picked. I don't know if I have still caught up.

It is now the middle of September. The nights are quite cool. We aren't picking tomatoes as we once were. It is not that there isn't any. These plants won't stop producing!!! In fact, I noticed today that they are covered in flowers, meaning more tomatoes are on their way!

Dad, you are doing a whole garden for me next spring.