• Automatic chicken waterer
• Microbusiness ebook
• Homemade deer deterrent
• Cosmic cookout
• Appalachian ecology

I've had my eye on our oldest tomato plant for weeks.  (This is the one that volunteered in our lemon tree's pot this winter and which I set out in the garden on April 21, babying through cold spells.)  The plant swelled up huge fruits, then kept swelling more and more fruits, none of which changed color.  Last week, I saw the tiniest hint of red on the oldest fruit, and crossed my fingers.  But I was looking in entirely the wrong spot for our first tomato.

Wednesday morning, I caught a glimpse of orange from the tomato bed on the opposite side of the naughty butternuts.  I peered closer and saw a fruit nearly ripe!

A few years ago when we splurged on seeds for several heirloom tomatoes, I picked out Stupice as a very cold-tolerant and early variety.  Sure enough, it looks like the Stupice tomato will probably be the first one on our plate, perhaps by the end of the week.

To be fair, though, this mini-experiment doesn't prove that tomatoes started in a cold frame and set out at the frost free date ripen just as quickly as those started indoors and transplanted out three weeks earlier.  I have absolutely no clue what variety my volunteer belongs to, and I suspect it might have been the seed of a storebought tomato that made it into our neighbor's compost and thus to us.  At this point, though, I'm at the who-cares stage --- as long as I get a sun-ripened tomato shortly, experiments will fly out of my head.