Step Forward!

     It looks as if we've once again got volunteer tomatoes in the backyard garden patch here at Roseholme Cottage.  They're probably the small, fast-ripening cherry tomatoes that came back last year.

     This is a pretty good trick.  Tomatoes are not a perennial; they're not even close.  Originally a jungle plant, tomatoes are not a natural fit to most climates in North America.  The little cherry tomatoes have a couple of tricks: they are very dense, so it's easy to miss the little tomatoes until they are too ripe -- and they go from ready to eat to overripe in a twinkling.  I tend to bury the too-ripe ones where they fall, or chuck them along the fence, where I'm hoping another patch will take root.  So far, the fence weeds have defeated my efforts, but the roughly circular garden patch, dominated by a sprawling and overly aromatic sage plant, has paid off.  I let the autumn leaves pile up on it and try not to disturb it until late Spring.  (We're in that three-week interregnum, after the beginning of meteorological summer but with astronomical spring lingering until the solstice.)

     The sawtooth-edged tomato leaves are distinctive, as is the tiny-tree structure of the new plants.  There may be some lookalike weeds fooling me -- nightshade is a close cousin* and the young plants look similar -- but I didn't have any in the patch around the sage last year, so my hopes are high.
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* But not that close, at least around here.  It has a less-dense structure with purple flowers and fewer of them, compared to the bushy leaves and yellow flowers of the tomatoes.  The fruit is mostly empty, too, with prominent segments.