Vegas tomatoes

This is a picture of my brother in the shirt I made him wear to a Vegas party thrown by me and the Texan back in June. (The Vol-in-Law had to wear an identical shirt - I'm considering a shot of them together to grace my Christmas cards this year)

The party was pretty wild. It was pretty drunken. By the end of the evening there was broken furniture, blood on the floor (thankfully easy-clean hardwood) and a trip to casualty (the ER, and fortunately just around the corner).

You may be able to see from this picture that we served strawberries and tomatoes (as well as some vile ham and pineapple on fancy toothpicks).

Drunken guests are not always the most fastidious guests, and a number of these tomatoes ended up in my flower beds. Some of the seeds from these tomatoes sprouted, and instead of weeding these out, I let them grow. A kind of horticultural experiment. This isn't working out as well as I might have hoped. We've had a lot of rain, so the tomatoes have grown a lot, but we haven't had a lot of sun and heat, so we don't have a lot of ripe tomatoes, and none from the flower bed tomatoes. Now the bed just looks weedy and overgrown, but I can't rip out the tomatoes now, because they're setting fruit. I try to remember what I've been told many times, a plant out of place is a weed, but I feel that the tomato has struggled so valiantly from such inauspicious beginnings that I must give it the chance to reach its potential.

I haven't been very good at staking or pinching out my tomatoes this year either, This picture shows how tomatoes in pots have been allowed to get out of control. You may be able to tell that's a monster of tomatoes, stakes and string, and these are ones I planted puposefully. It's two pots of Sungold and another kind of red cherry tomato I forget the cultivar name.