Winter Eyes

The weather has been cooling rapidly as those of us in the Northern hemisphere begin the gradual slide into winter.  And this signals the start of the official 'winterization' project, which includes, unfortunately, trying to convince the stupid plants that they should stop producing fruit and instead devote their energies to hunkering down for the long, cold winter.

Tomatoes are so stupid.

I went out to the garden yesterday and picked off all the tomatoes I could see, ripe or un-ripe, and put them in a bowl.  Do you see how full that bowl is?  This is from one stupid tomato plant.  ONE.

Tomatoes are so stupid.

As you may have noticed, most of the fruit of this plant is still green.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the fruit of the tomato plant, green means that they are not ready to be picked yet (unless you are some idiotic vegetable conglomerate who puts them into trucks to that they will ripen on the long-distance trip between here and California). Red means that they are ripe and juicy and ready to go into a salad.  How many red tomatoes do you seen in that bowl?

Do you also notice, over there on the left, that there are still yellow flowers coming off the stems?  Yellow flowers are usually located in the place where the tomatoes eventually grow.  When the flower gets pollinated, the flower part disappears and a tomato (eventually) takes its place. So this plant is obviously expecting that there is going to be some pollination taking place soon.

Tomatoes are so very stupid.

It's getting very cold outside at night.  The weatherman predicts that we're going to have temperatures near freezing in a few days.  The plants are going to get completely demoralized.  By now, they should've been hiking up their skirts and heading for warmer climes (if only tomatoes could migrate, like coconuts!).  But they don't.  Because they are tomatoes.

Because they are stupid.

So in the next couple of days, we're going to go out there and dig up those stupid tomato plants and place them in our winterization pots, and strategically arrange those pots inside the house somewhere so that the plants will (hopefully) survive throughout the winter; and then, in the spring, we're going to take them outside - this time, after we're sure that all the freezing temperatures won't be coming back - and thus restart our summer garden.

Hopefully.  If the tomatoes cooperate.

And if I can figure out where on earth in this crowded house to put the pots of plants.  Which include, aside from the tomatoes, a broccoli plant, a half-dozen watermelon plants (which never produced any fruit), two lettuce plants (which never produced any real lettuce leaves), and a couple of flowering plants whose names escape me.

I hope the other plants aren't as stupid as the tomatoes, but the fact that they haven't died back yet makes me suspect that they are.

Where's the PAUSE button on plants?