Last Tomatoes for 2022

By Published On: November 30th, 20222 min readCategories: Photos
a dead vegetable garden

Veggie Garden burned out at the end of a long season

The vegetable garden is limping into winter. Most of the raised beds are burned out and waiting for the chickens to come in and do their cleanup work. Before I release the feathered furies into the garden though, I always do one last walkthrough to look for any edibles I may have missed.

The corn and squash are definitely done. The broccoli made a second charge at flowering during the Indian summer a few weeks ago. They broke through the plastic varmit barriers, and spilled into the middle of the path between a couple of beds where they proceeded to go wild. The chickens will take care of that.

The hot pepper plants are still hanging in there, but I picked most of the peppers still worth picking last week as a last addition to Batch 22 of the fermented hot sauce.

A tomato plant on a trellis

The Roma tomato isn’t much to look at, but…

All the tomatoes at the west end of the garden are fried. This time of year that area is shaded from the sun all but a couple hours a day and the cold air running downslope settles in, making it the outdoor equivalent of the produce bin in the refrigerator.

One bright spot is a Roma tomato in a bed on the south end of the garden. The twine that held it up on the support teepee snapped in the rain and wind earlier this month, so the plant spilled outward and just kind of hangs there now. The inner portions are dead, but the outer portions continue to grow despite the freeze/heat cycle it goes through every day. It’s even flowering.

More remarkable, however, is it’s still producing fruit. I found several young, green tomatoes, probably half a dozen green/orange and heading to red, and another half-dozen or so ready to pick.

We’re going to have garden fresh tomatoes in December! Maybe not very far into December (I see frost damage creeping on the outer leaves), but December nonetheless.

a bowl or red tomatoes

Tomatoes fresh off the vine at the end of November

Awesome! A very good surprise at the end of the season.

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About the Author

author avatar
Sage Osterfeld
I’m just a guy with nearly an acre of dirt, a nice little mid-century ranch house and a near-perfect climate. But in my mind I’m a landscaper survivalist craftsman chef naturalist with a barbeque the size of a VW and my own cable TV show. I like to write about the stuff I build, grow and see here at Sage's Acre.

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