When I got back from the grocery store, I remembered I needed to water the garden, so to the garden I trudged. While giving the last bed a good drink, my eyes happened across a plant growing in that old wagon a converted into a planter for flowers this summer. A plant that wasn’t a weed like all the other plants in the wagon. A plant that looked vaguely familiar even to my non-eyeglass-wearing eyes. I wandered closer to get a better look.

My garden gave me a gift!

A volunteer tomato plant has sprung up all by itself! No way to tell what kind it is, but it is a bush type, and the closest bush type tomato that was growing near the wagon was a Homestead (heirloom). This is the first really exciting thing that has happened in the garden for months!

Of course, it can’t stay where it is. There’s only three inches of dirt in that wagon, and it’s going to be getting colder soon. Saturday I’ll be putting it in a pot so I can move it around and bring it indoors if I need to when it gets too cold^†, but we may very well have some fall and winter tomatoes after all. It’s just too awesome!

Thank you garden for giving me a totally cool gift today. I needed it. Now I am excited about going out to the garden again, which I really haven’t been terribly excited about doing for quite a while now.

1. † I’ll be doing a lot of garden things on Saturday. I still need to clear out the basil and plant the regular lettuce, as well as clearing out the weedy future fourth bed to plant the fennel. Yes, going to be a busy day on Saturday. [↩]