Tomato!

If you plant it... suprisingly it will grow, albeit at an extremely slow pace. We planted a brandywine tomato plant in a 5 gallon bucket and set her on our back deck – plenty of sun. The plant itself grew extremely fast - and to huge proportion - with plenty of flowers and big, sticky leaves. But then the flowers died off soon after and nothing happened. So we waited... And waited. We wondered if we would ever see a tomato – what could we be doing wrong? Perhaps it was the fairly mild summer we were having in Boston – although one day it could be 65 degrees, and the next 90, so perhaps it was the temperature swings that we stunting our pretty little tomato plant.

Then suddenly, there was one tiny little green tomato making its way into the world. It took maybe 2 weeks for it to get up to size and then another 1.5 weeks for it to ripen on the vine. We took it off and let it ripen a bit more on the kitchen counter. And then last night, we could wait no longer. Whatever we were having with dinner, we were going to have a tomato to go along with it!



Obviously, the star of the show is Brandywine herself with a touch of kosher salt. Her backup singers were Miss Parmesan Couscous and Mr. Oregano-tarragon Chicken Thighs who happened to be lounging in a red wine mushroom sauce. The dinner was magnificent! We can only wait for the other little green tomatoes to come up – they seem to all be growing faster than our first!