On Midmorning this morning a master gardener told me that if I have hard green tomatoes on my tomato plant, it’s too late 
I am reluctant to acknowledge this, and am trying to keep positive based on last year’s mid-October tomato harvest:
But now I am thinking about all the vegetables I may not get a harvest from at all: cucumbers, pole beans, summer squash (okay, there’s one fruit on the plant, but that’s it), okra, bitter melon, five tomato plants (brandywine, martian giant, persimmon, wapsipinicom peach, zapotec, cherokee purple), rocoto pepper, soybeans, corn, watermelon, and probably a few more that I just am not thinking of right now.
Also, my reisetomate is having an identity crisis. This is what the fruit is looking like:
which, incidentally, looks nothing like these.
One of my corn stalks has started shedding pollen, and all the corn appears to be a decent height, but I can’t find any of the silks that are supposed to be pollinated (here is information I found about corn pollination).
It looks like, in Minnesota last week, 95% of the crop corn was silking. This puts my corn at least a week behind the norm, which I guess is not terrible, considering my shady yard. I guess the decider will be whether I get any ears.
Only 50% of the crop soybeans are setting pods in MN. I would love to just get a few from my plants.
Sigh.
Posted by Sig. on 10.30.2011 at 2:05 am
One of my students called me a hippie the other day…which is funny, because I’m really not. Not at all.
Posted by Lauren on 08.12.2011 at 4:15 pm
That’s hogwash. Don’t listen to that master? gardener – you have plenty of time to add color to those tomatoes. PLUS they can still ripen “on the vine” inside of your house, should we be threatened with a freeze. I know that last year by this day, we had huge harvests – and this year so far for me, just the smaller varieties are ripe right now – but I recall that my plants last year still continued to ripen slow-poke tomatoes into late September, early October.
Don’t give up hope!
[Most of my big tomatoes look just like the picture you posted. I do have a few big ones that are almost ripe and more that have hints of color, but most are huge yet solidly green.]
Posted by Thelma on 08.12.2011 at 3:35 pm
I too went into panic with Midmorning’s comments about green tomatoes…..then I came home to find half my tomatoes had a tad red on them. There’s hope!
And soybeans are WAAAAY behind. My fields are some of the early-planted and they’re weeks behind last year. Hang in there girl, we’ll get something out of this year. Just hope we get another month of summer!
Posted by Chris Burnell on 08.12.2011 at 12:42 pm
you are not a hippie, you are a lawyer
Posted by rakhi on 08.12.2011 at 2:37 pm
hence the “inadvertent” modifier, my dear