It’s been a while since I last posted about my fascination with my backyard. With the way things have been going lately, I haven’t spent as much time on it as I would have liked. We still planted some tomatoes, as is my tradition, but I’ve let them go a bit wild. I haven’t pruned or trained them like I should, so they’ve been allowed to go a bit crazy. I also haven’t been keeping up with pest control, which means my garden i overrun with these things:

Yup, that’s a tomato hornworm. Dani and I found about ten of them last night, and I just finished picking off about four more. I understand birds love these things, but I don’t think I’m doing enough to attract the birds to them.

I planted three different varieties of tomato this year - Celebrity, Mortgage Lifter and Sweet 100. The Celebrity and Sweet 100 are doing great. The Mortgage Lifter? Well, look’s like I’ll have to find another way to pay the house payment this year.

Buried amidst the Sweet 100 bushel was an old decorative stake from our home’s previous owners. I forgot about it and it fell over under the plant. A flower must have gotten caught up in it because when I found it this morning, this is what I saw:

That tomato is not squished - it actually grew in there like that. I gently pried apart the metal sculpture and extracted the tomato to prove the point:

Nature is weird. The good news, though, is that despite my neglect, we actually have quite a bumper crop of tomatoes:

For future reference, though, one probably shouldn’t go poking around my backyard at the moment without wearing some kind of foot protection, lest you come back inside with a foot full of these:

In my wife’s words, they hurt like a huckabuck. We keep tracking them into the house on our shoes and finding them in the worst imaginable way. This one’s less than a quarter inch long, but man does it pack a wallop.

I hope that next year is a bit calmer so that we can finally, finally get our backyard together. I’m really looking forward to having a little calming oasis just a few footsteps away.