Frost Bite

The universe might be telling us not to grow tomatoes, but we are not listening.
 
Frost bitten tomatoes making a come back. I was so convinced that the frost on the morning of April 20th would be our last that I wasn’t paying any attention last week and was completely blind-sided by another frost early last Thursday morning.  Everything in the greenhouse was fine, and aside from some dead leaves, everything out in the field pulled through.  Unfortunately we had all the tomatoes, melons, squash and cucumber starts on tables outside the greenhouse where they were being hardened off in preparation for planting.  The tomato death toll was around 400.
 
I had what might be considered a moderate melt-down.  About an hour of crying and screaming followed by 24 hours of emotional coma.  It was a tough day.  Randy stoically skipped the crying and screaming part but was equally distraught.  Some of you will remember the aminopyralid disaster of 2012.  What is it with us and tomatoes?
 
Enough bad news, time for the good news.  About half the cucurbits had already been planted, and the ones we lost can be reseeded.  We still had about 300 tomato plants in the greenhouse.  Luckily the farm store had some of our varieties, so I bought another 100 there.  Back in the greenhouse, some of the frozen tomatoes are coming back to life.  Thank goodness, vegetable plants are tougher than you might think.  All together, we will have enough.  The balance may not be what we wanted.  We completely lost the Zarnitsas and the Reisentraubes, and we don’t have as many Green Zebras and Cherokee Purples as we would like.  But we will have tomatoes.  Scratch that, we will plant tomatoes.  There are still an infinite number of things that could go wrong, and I wouldn’t want to issue a challenge to the universe.