Wild tomatoes
for guests

May 07, 2006

Here's a clump of wild tomato seedlings with the exploded tomato skin still attached to the roots like a busted balloon. They're popping up everywhere in my kitchen garden, and to think I wasted all that time fussing with the foetuses and a propagator when they can grow themselves all by their lonesome. From now on I'm just going to let a few tomatoes dry on the vine and let them dump themselves on the ground. I may just be getting the hang of the Masanobu Fukuoka style of gardening!

These are currant tomatoes, a wild variety that produced zillions of little berry sized fruit and which pretty much scattered itself throughout my kitchen garden end of season. This is the one I use as my 'guest tomato', planted at the ends of the rows so that visitors can have something to nibble on and I can put lingerers to work on an obsessive compulsive harvesting task.