The Curse of the Black Thumb, or Two Red Tomatoes

On the left you see the 'fixins' for an end of season tomato sandwich grown in our garden. On the right you see the 14,725 green tomatoes that did not grow larger than an inch. (it seemed like that many when I picked them yesterday, one more bag is out of sight.) Thank goodness for a recipe for green tomato relish.

It began innocently enough- two new raised beds w highly touted dirt a la Square Foot Gardening. Chard, green beans, zucchini, yellow squash,and cukes with tomatoes against the fence. They began to grow nicely, and we enjoyed some meals of yellow squash.

There were literally hundreds of blossoms on the tomatoes and the cukes. I pinched off the suckers to encourage larger fruit growth. We were thrilled, thinking of the bounteous harvest to come.

One morning we woke to find monster plants. They had spread all over each other, and were threatening to take over the entire yard. The blossoms produced nothing. They simply sat there, tantalizing us.

Our entire take was 1 'mess' of green beans, 4 of chard, 8 cucumbers, 16 pieces of zucchini and 32 pieces of yellow squash. I kept looking for a partridge in a pear tree.

The last photo is dead plants. Note that 3 marigolds on the left are even bigger. I pulled them all up because I began to have nightmares of vines coming thru the windows at night to strangle us. So much for gardening.