I Picked Tomatoes This Morning

In cloudy, gloomy, forty-degree weather that felt like quite the wrong season for it.

This summer we had our worst drought in over fifty years, and we'd given up on our vegetation.  We watered just enough to keep (we think) anything from dying, but everything was very dry, brown, and scorched.  The grass went dormant and, instead of weekly, we didn't have to mow from the first few days of June until the second half of September.  We had eleven volunteer tomato plants growing wild in the new gardens we were neglecting until next year when we're more settled in, and when they stopped ripening or producing we gave them up for gone.

But there was rain at the start of September and more sporadically since (though we're still way behind for the year) that seems to have brought everything back to life.  The grass is green and new again and at times the mild weather last month felt more like spring than fall.  The past few days, the weather has definitely become very fall-like (with our first hard freeze expected tonight), yet when I was out with the dogs this morning I noticed new flowers blooming and lots of new tomatoes coming in on a few of the plants that outlasted the drought, some already red and ripe.  It really is like a second spring in some ways.  We'll have to see how cold it gets tonight and if anything survives.