Surprise Guests

Two yellow flowers

on a new tomato plant

bloom against cold glass. 

We didn't expect that one of our indoor tomatoes -- left for dead when winter blasted into the Valley -- would give birth to a new plant, much less that two fragile blossoms would develop on its branches. Who am I to say whether it's too early for fresh tomatoes? Stranger things have happened in our sunroom garden, like green-and-orange bell pepper mutations and red Roma tomatoes dangling from the vines long after summer. This plant is an offshoot of one of our orange tomatoes. These plants produce bright fruit in Day-glo colors, sweet as candy. 

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind.