Can't garden in Bend, you know.

Hang on little tomatoes!

Well, I don't know.  I'm new here. Great things are born from not knowing, from experimenting, from just giving it a whirl, from watching with wide eyes while magic happens.

Their first real home

And, you know what? There's magic in a bucket of composted chicken poo left from my generous hens in Portland.

Room to grow

All Northwest gardeners know that you start tomatoes from seed in February or March. When danger of frost is past (late, late May), you set them out on their own in the garden. Our new land turned things totally upside down.





Two magical little tomato plants sprang up this fall in the bucket of chicken compost from seeds of my own growing a year before we moved.

Blossoms

My bewildered brain couldn't sort out the sequence of events till harvest for these babies.  But when the first frost in September and the second frost in October didn't destroy them, intervention was in order.  They moved into the house.

Yellow and orange tomatoes
on the snowy deck (you may need to squint)

The Christmas tree went up. The Christmas tree came down. All the Presidents' Days were observed.  Even St. Patrick had his show. Then one day nasty little webs and spotted, sick leaves appeared on the five-foot-tall plants.  I was pretty sure this was the end and dragged the tomatoes out on the deck.  I was sad, and it snowed that night.

Waiting for warm

One plant is a yellow cherry tomato with five fruits--three of them ripe.  The other is Jeunne Flamme' with over a dozen golf-ball sized tomatoes.  When you are a tomato, and you live in Bend, and you are able to produce a ripened fruit before the end of March, before other tomatoes are even in the ground, you've done an exceptional job.  The webs are now gone, and even though there's been snow on the vine, the plants aren't giving up.  Looks like there are things to be learned about gardening in this new land. Snow on Monday.  75 degrees on Thursday. Hang on little tomatoes!