First of the season

In my own opinion, this is a rather good picture nice berry, a  flower at the stage of seed dispersal.  Today is the 30th of June, and this was picked this morning.  TPP grew up near lake Ontario in upstate NY, so according to the good old boys, if you got a tomato before July, you were doing well.  This year our area suffered a late frost and some "early" planted tomatoes and their tropical kin, peppers and eggplant, got nipped.  Our frost tree date is about 10-15 May, so TPP was not in a hurry before then and soil in boxes tends to warm up pretty fast.  Now this image doesn't provide a very good size metric, and indeed this is a so-called "cherry tomato"; generally rather small.  Mrs. Phactor ate this nice little fruit a few seconds later and declared it delicious.  These golden colored cherry tomatoes do seem to be sweet and tasty.  And here it is a whole day before July, the very beginning of our 3 month long tomato season.  That's it, 3 months to get tasty garden tomatoes.  It just doesn't seem fair, but it does represent a challenge.  The cherry tomato is a lot more like its wild cousins in being composed of 2 carpels (seed bearing leaves), which can be easily seen when the fruit is cut in half.

cherry tomatoes

This year's cherry tomato produces handsome golden spheres with a nice combination tartness and sweet tomato flavor. Nothing quite like cutting a few of these in half, combining them with equal sized pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese, lots of chopped basil, and then drizzling the combination with some olive oil and a balsamic vinegar. That is summer salad gold. Oh, and if accompanied by fresh white & gold Lincolnland sweet corn, and some pork ribs seasoned with a dry bbq rub, damn, pure summer goodness.