Volunteer Tomatoes
While weeding my little produce patches earlier this summer I spotted what looked liked tomato leaves popping up near where last summer’s cherry tomato plant grew. I decided to leave it alone and see what happened.
Soon it grew taller and sprouted more leaves. A couple weeks ago it began to blossom. The other day I spotted the first of several tiny green cherry tomatoes beginning to form.
See the first tiny tomato from my volunteer tomato plant?
It’s already Labor Day, so who knows if any of these volunteers will ripen before the first hard frost, but that really doesn’t matter since I can always add them to my annual batch of homemade green tomato salsa!
Happy Labor Day, everyone! (And yes, I’ll be laboring a bit today….no such thing as a paid holiday when you’re a freelancer.)
Posted on September 3, 2012, in gardening, produce, summer, yardwork and tagged food, gardening, summer, tomatoes, volunteer plants. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Create From Scratch 
I have a couple of these too, and I’m wondering if they’ll make it. They are much healthier than my planned tomato plants, just not very good timing. Green tomato salsa sounds like a good idea.
Did yours seem to go from one or two small leaves to small plants almost overnight, too? Maybe it was the heatwave, but this little guy grew incredibly fast.
I nipped off the new growth at the top, hoping less energy would go to growing new leaves and more would go into the tomatoes themselves. Not sure if it helped or not – it’s still getting taller, but has even more blooms now.
I didn’t even see the thing and it was suddenly three feet tall and covered with leaves and blossoms. Crazy.
A few minutes ago when I had my dog out I realized the volunteer is already larger than one of the three tomato seedlings I planted this year – and has more blossoms. (To be fair, the smaller seedling has already produces numerous tomatoes.)