Throwing tomatoes

We had one time, years ago, when we were driving through California’s Central Valley around harvest season and found ourselves behind a semi.  It was loaded past the top with grocery-store-ripe (as in, not) tomatoes.  We couldn’t see any wooden crates dividing them into layers, although there may have been; from our vantage point, it was simply one giant  mounded-over pile and one could only imagine the weight on the ones at the bottom. Had to be for canning, right?

We kept our car back a little bit after the first time that truck hit a bump. We didn’t want those fresh round rocks in an argument with our windshield.

This is the second year in a long while that I’ve planted my own and I’m hoping it becomes a habit.

And so I was so looking forward to that first really good, sweet, homegrown tomato on my (yes just) one little plant.  That biggest one was a goodly bright orange and getting brighter, not quite red yet; it didn’t have that intense tomato essence yet, but give it time.  I tried not to examine it too closely too many times a day.  Getting there…

And then the water that I always have set out for the critters got pulled over by one of them and emptied out and I didn’t notice immediately.  I found out when I looked out the window and discovered my so-anticipated veggie out in the yard: when I stepped out to see, hoping that maybe just maybe I could simply retrieve it (good luck with that), I found that one of the squirrels had stripped the side open, sucked it out, and left the hard outer carcass lying there in reproach.  It didn’t even eat the piece it had torn off.  It didn’t even pull it to the trees for a proper burial in hopes it would sprout more like the one squirrel had done with the whipped cream cup.

It didn’t like grocery-store-hard tomatoes.

Turkey.

Chucked that one. Okay, then. Four more to go and lots of tomato flowers.

Since then, no more fruit has set and the plant has just barely been hanging in there. I’m thinking I got a determinate variety, which sets all at once and then dies, good for someone doing canning, rather than an indeterminate, which keeps producing merrily till frost like I’d hoped for.

The plant is in a pot and I keep threatening to bring it inside out of the squirrels’ reach, but it’s pretty leggy and windy and viney, y’know?  Those four tomatoes, hanging on. It’s been a slow, cold season this year.

I noted a black squirrel rubbing its face vigorously today–I’d shaken some very hot pepper flakes around those four after the theft. Busted!

Meantime, a few days ago I thought part of the problem with losing our water supply out there is these plastic disposable cups I’ve been using (because I don’t care what happens to them) –they’re old, they’re thin, they crack easily.  I ought to put something sturdier and steadier out there.

And so I braced an old Tupperware cup in the usual spot and filled it up.

It didn’t stay put long at all!  It disappeared, and I had to go looking.

Dang, that must have been one hard tomato.  But someone kept on trucking–I found the plastic slivers.  And this time it *was* over by the tree trunks.  That squirrel kept on chewing, sure the juice and seeds must be in there somewhere: Come ON! GIVE it to me!

I don’t think Tupperware’s lifetime warranty quite covers that.