We bought this tomato plant shortly after moving in to our new place in Fairfax. It was kind of a consolation prize; I'd originally bought DH seed packets for Valentine's Day, thinking this more productive than most traditional Valentine's Day presents. And it would have been, but we weren't ready to handle seed germination. So I brought home a tomato plant; it was about a foot tall when we first got it.
We could water it first with a pepsi bottle. Then a 2-liter pepsi bottle as it grew. Then it needed a bucket. By July, it was almost as tall as we were, and it produced about 20 wonderful tomatoes before it fell ill. Spider mites had gotten hold of it, blistering it, dehydrating it, killing it.
Honestly, we'd just given up on it. It didn't produce any new tomatoes during August or September. The July ones ripened and were tasty, but as the blight took over the plant, we watched it wither, helpless. But prune we did, pulling away the blighted stems and clearing what we could from the stems that didn't look totally brown yet.
One day in late September, though, we saw new growth along some of the less ravaged stems. The plant was fighting! New flowers took, opened, swallowed, and formed into those familiar, pea-sized tomato buds. We thought it would be consumed by the blight, too, but oh, the green: We now have 8 young tomatoes, racing against the curtain of frost that may fall within a few weeks:
Just because something looks like it may be in the throes of destruction, there may yet be more fruit to yield. Don't give up on things just because they look overwhelming or beyond repair. Life, like love, fights to go on, and the joy you feel when renewal and healing come to pass is sustenance for the soul.
Where there is sickness, whether of heart, mind, soul, or tomato plant, let us offer prayers of healing, and let us give thanks for the blessings that health, balance, and growth bestow.
Posted in Gardening, Yum! by: Helen
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