Well, fifteen weeks of care, complaining, campaigning and captaining and bugger if a tropical storm doesn't annihilate half the garden! I picked the biggest green tomatoes the night before Irene and had trimmed the excess foliage in an effort to funnel all the growth efforts to ripening the tomatoes. Now after the storm, it looks like Children of the Corn got into my tomatoes! The leaves are dry, the branches have snapped - and of course now the tomatoes start to turn red! I wrapped the tomatoes picked the night before the storm in newspaper to encourage ripening and it seems to actually be working. The tomatillos are being breaced with so much string and bamboo, it's like a cat's cradle anti-theft system in there. One of the big tomatillo plants snapped like it was struck by lightening and all of the pepper plants are swept forward. Should I pull up stakes and cut bait, if you'll excuse the mixed expressions? Sigh.
