And I wonder why I hate people.

So my great growing tomatoes?

Someone came and ripped (literally) my two big (still green) brandywines right from the vine. Like, the stalk where they were hanging is all shredded — this person just tore them off with their hands, I guess. Now my brandywine plant doesn’t have any fruit at all.

People really suck, is what I’m trying to say.

Growing (green) things

I generally consider myself to have a black thumb — I kill plants. I have had any number of indoor and outdoor plants over the many years, and I have managed to kill every single one of them. And it’s not even that I kill them through neglect — I’ve killed plants that I was actively trying to nurture. I’m just not good at it. I lack the plant gene.

Except that somehow, I am now growing tomatoes. And mint. And cilantro (or I was, until it bolted, which I didn’t even know was a Thing until I read up on the internet about why my cilantro was flowering and creating seeds).

Now, the mint I can’t really take much credit for — in this part of the country, mint grows wild pretty easily, so I hoped that if I just stuck it in the ground, it would take care of itself. And it has. But tomatoes are just not that low-maintenance. Or at least I didn’t think they were. In my case, though, they really are growing themselves. I throw some water on them every few days if it hasn’t rained and otherwise leave them mostly alone.

Except that they are now so tall that they were really starting to droop. So today, I took myself and my black thumb over to Home Depot and bought tomato stakes (which…! I bought useful gardening implements? Who is this person?), came home, and spent an hour in the mid-afternoon sun (bad call on my part) staking and tying my oversized, out-of-control tomatoes.

Anyway, y’all. After I staked up those plants I realized — my tomatoes are INSANE. They are nearly as tall as I am and they are fruiting like mad. Like, I expect to have pints and pints and pints of Yellow Pear cherry tomatoes in just a few short weeks, when the several bunches of green fruit start to ripen. The other tomato plant — a Pink Brandywine — is not fruiting quite as madly (it’s not known for being as prolific, probably because it produces enormous fruit) but it’s still doing far, far better than I ever dreamed.

I don’t know how much of this gardening luck is due to where we live — after all, this area doesn’t get the temperature extremes that Austin or Chicago, my last two cities, experience — and how much of it is due to the fact that my in-laws, who do have the plant gene, were here to help us when we decided to put in a garden. Whatever it is, though, I’m enjoying it, even as I stare, bewildered, at the green things I am managing to grow.