There comes a time at near the end of every summer when I stand in the backyard and survey the wreckage of what was a thriving tomato patch and ask myself why do I do this.

Most of my plants are dying or as good as dead. Not the dramatic, quick death of a frost. That would be too merciful. This is the slow, undignified decline. Yellowing leaves. Cracked stems. A general vibe of “I have given up but nobody has told me I’m allowed to stop.” The tomato plant does not die so much as it resigns. Quietly like a employee who stopped caring around July but kept showing up for the health insurance.

Scattered among the ruins you see them…..there they are: the stragglers. A few last tomatoes, still clinging to the vine with the misplaced confidence of a me wearing shorts in November. They are not ripe. They will not become ripe on any reasonable timeline. But I pick them anyway, because throwing them directly into the compost feels like admitting defeat, and instead you line them up on the windowsill in a ritual best described as hospice care for produce.

In past years the fight has been real. The constant battle……me vs Arlo and Mags for superiority of the tomato patch. The unexplained reason of the one plant at the end of the garden that keeps getting dug up by one of the monsters no matter how many plants I put there.

But alas this year has been different. A new horror. One that sets in around week three of a genuinely great tomato season not the horror of loss, but the horror of success, which nobody warns you about. The counters are full. The windowsills are full. There is a colander of tomatoes currently occupying the chair I normally sit in to eat dinner, which means I have been displaced from my own kitchen by my own competence.

For years, blight and squirrels and my general garden incompetence gave me a built-in excuse not otherwise deal with a real harvest. That excuse is gone. It died sometime in August buried under an avalanche of Better Boys. Now I am a man standing in his kitchen at 9 a.m. staring at four pounds of tomatoes, googling the next recipe that requires cherry tomatoes.

I honestly do not want to be this person. I want that on record. But somewhere around late July, when the plants had already outgrown their cages, developed the structural integrity of small trees, and begun producing tomatoes at a pace that can only be described as “aggressive,” I realized I had become that neighbor. You know the one. I’ve tried to downplay it. When people ask how the tomatoes did this year, I say “oh, not bad,” in the same voice you’d use to describe a mildly successful dentist appointment. But it was not “not bad.” It was the kind of season where I ran out of people to give tomatoes to. Where the neighbors started walking faster. Where I briefly considered starting an unlicensed farm stand out of simple necessity.

The squirrels, for reasons I do not know have chosen not to investigate. They left me alone this year. The blight went elsewhere presumably to someone who deserved it more than I did, which is to say, everyone. Arlo and Mags did not dig this year. My plants stood tall, glossy, and defiant.

I recognize that somewhere, a man with six sad, spotted vines is reading this and hating me with his whole chest. To him I say: I don’t know what to tell you. Rotate your beds. Pray to whichever deity handles nightshades. Or just accept that some years, the universe picks a favorite, and this year, inexplicably, it picked me.

“Nothing I like better than a homegrown tomato”.
See you in April.