Tomatoes: the plant that keeps on giving

My first tomato was ready to eat in late July; it probably could have been earlier with more sun and more fertilizer, but I'm not complaining. A couple of succulent, dainty tomatoes per day for last month is more than I could have hoped for. The first was yellow, but since then there have been red, orange, and pink, too. The seed packets said nothing of orange, so I'm going to assume those have occurred due to cross-pollenation. All in all, my opinion of the tomatoes is along the lines of "A+++ will plant again!"

Hopefully this doesn't get me hooked on heirlooms, because I prefer to think of gardening as a frugal hobby...

After a terrible wind storm earlier this August, the neighbour's enormous poplar tree lost a huge limb (on to my yard and driveway, of course) and the following evening as I was harvesting the day's tomatoes, it caught my eye that they had hired a tree service to take the whole thing down. Although it was sad to see such a majestic tree go, the lost branch destroyed the integrity of the whole tree, and it was poised to fall on my garage.

So, armed with a handful of fresh picked tomatoes, I got to watch an amazing acrobatic chainsaw show from the comfort of my own driveway. The only way the evening could have been better? If the wind wasn't blowing the sawdust into my face. What a great evening's entertainment.

As a bonus, with that tree gone, most of the shade over my vegetable bed has disappeared, so should I choose to try corn again next year, it might actually succeed. In reality, with the shade gone, I can plant whatever the heck I fancy in that bed... except for the leafy greens that I had been thinking about since learning the lesson that corn don't grow in shade.