The Tomato Patch: Sunshine Sundays

I have never been much of a gardener.  I can do it well enough when I put my mind to it, but the repetitive nature of having to constantly tend to it has never been an appeal.  I get excited at watching the plants grow, but the effort of maintaining it just seems too much.

In August Paul decided to create a little veggie patch in my backyard.  Right beside the clothesline there is a little patch of dirt that grew nothing but weeds and rock monsters.  He wanted something different there.  Something that wouldn’t need to be mowed.  So a veggie patch it was.

I wasn’t a very tentative veggie patch owner and the back yard is often not somewhere that we hang out.  So it was easy for the plants to become neglected.  Some of the plants thrived under this environment, while others perished.  Just between you and me, I’m glad that the peas perished.

One day, nearly two months ago, I walked outside to hang the washing on the line and was greeted with a great monster of a bush.  The tomatoes it turned out were the perfect kind of plant for me.  They flourished under my haphazard gardening skills.  The vine was covered in tiny little berries with what seemed like hundreds more flowers blooming along the branches.10629642_911987238829032_4594051869811459459_n

While the rest of the backyard was barely surviving under the shade of the tree that covers most of the space, the tomatoes loved it.  There was no sun to burn their delicate leaves, no passing by birds to notice the bright red tomatoes adorning the branches.

It’s amazing that through all of the things that were placed in its way, the tomato bush still grew, and grew.  It didn’t give up because the conditions were less than ideal.  Instead, the vine wrapped itself around the pegs that would keep it safe.  It protected the tomatoes that were growing beneath the leaves.

Last week I had to chop back the tomato vine.  It had exhausted itself and the heat was burning the leaves.  There were no more tomatoes on the branches.  It looks strangely bare now, like a skeleton.  However through that skeleton there is already green shoots sprouting off the branches, little buds are growing too.  The cycle of life continues on.

Do you like to garden?  Do you have a veggie patch?

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