Fall tomatoes

Three tomato plants survived the summer and are now loaded with fruit. This cherry tomato (I think it is a Sweet 100) was a volunteer which has sprawled to cover half of this raised bed. It probably has more than a hundred pea-to-marble sized tomatoes on it now. Two other plants in another bed, ironically among the ones that I thought had died last March, are also huge bushes bearing dozens of green tomatoes.

I'm not sure the tomatoes will ripen before a frost does them in. Although the temperatures are close to perfect for them to set fruit, it ripens much more slowly during the shorter days. That's what happened last year in my experiment with a fall tomato crop last year, and why I didn't plan to repeat the experiment. However, this year I didn't have to put out new, small transplants in late July and baby them through August and September...this were established plants that refused to die. I couldn't bear to dig up such healthy looking plants, so I decided to leave them alone.

We'll see what happens.