Tomatoes!

In other news, summer is bearing fruit and our tomatoes are coming on!  I noticed earlier in the week that we had yellow flowers showing up each day, and wondered when they would wilt into the stems of young tomatoes. (As seen to the right)

It turns out that today was that day! Perhaps overnight is a more accurate time description, because yesterday there was no tomato and this afternoon POOF, there was!

This is the close up photo my husband took, and the tomato in it looks much closer than it actually is, but it is actually a baby... about the size of your thumb, I'd say. (I have big thumbs, so it's hard to tell for other folks!) It really is a beautiful little thing, and I am hoping against hope that the blight which hit the tomatoes last year will bug off and leave them alone this year. After all, last year I had regular, unstellar tomatoes (also grape tomatoes, which came on wonderfully) but this year we have hillbilly tomatoes!

Otherwise known as 'beefsteak' tomatoes, these are the big, juicy jobs that fill up your hand and which a single slice, cut thick enough, is perfect for a tomato sandwich! I have two more 'billies' (seedling hillbilly tomato plants) growing in a pot right from the seed, but the one that is already fruiting is a hybrid. I shudder at that word; I'd much rather have a tomato that is as God intended it to be instead of a hybrid, but that is what the store had already started so we took it.

This particular hybrid beefsteak was bred to be smooth and round not as oddly shaped and lumpy... why in Heaven they want perfectly smooth tomatoes, I'll never know... to me it loses some of the home-grown feel. That said, I'll still take a hybrid grown on my own deck under my tender care and God's sunshine and rain over the tomatoes I buy at the store the rest of the year! Amen! lol