🍅

I got six tomato plants at the beginning of the season, and did what I normally do, which is plant three of them in the raised bed and three of them in separate standalone, self-irrigating planters. This all went great until the three standalone plants decided to live miserably, growing tomatoes with brown bottoms, brown-tipped leaves, wilting, stunted, etc.

The three plants in the raised bed have absolutely conquered my backyard. They are taller than I am. They have too many tomatoes, hardly any of which have ripened yet, because it’s been over 90º for almost all of August so far. In a week or so, temperatures will dip, and I will absolutely drown in tree-borne lycopene.

My friends stage interventions on my behalf, but mostly I have decided to cut the losses of the other three plants, even while leaving them there. I curse their existence as I marvel at what else is happening in the backyard. I am certain that there’s a reason for these plants doing so poorly, but I can’t bring myself to care, and there’s probably no saving them such that I can get any fruit before frost point.

Chicago is like this. You don’t know whether you have to frantically salvage the thing until it’s too late, and once it’s too late you throw it all away and wait until April again. I’m sure there is a better way, one that involves constant daily vigilance and a nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of plant problems, but in practice my leafy fools are going to do whatever they want while I calmly run a design consultancy into the ground with my hair on fire. And so I am now stuck planning 2023 tomatoes, and the attendant equipment surrounding them, while half of my 2022 tomatoes continue being garbage sons.