Let's Play "What's My Tomato?"

"Enter, Mystery Tomato, and sign in, please."

When we did the tomato grafting this Spring, the results were not quite as successful as we had hoped they would be; only one of the ten grafted plants survived.  See:  http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2016/04/not-quite-as-successful-as-we-hoped.html.

The one tomato plant that did survive was supposed to be a Rose de Berne on Estamino root stock.
We were a little surprised when the surviving plant put on a huge growth spurt and began rambling all over that end of the raised bed.  It produced very large yellow flowers that attracted the attention of an industrious bumble bee and of the California Towhees, but as time went on, not much in the way of tomatoes appeared.

Grafted Plant on the Left

When tomatoes did begin to appear, they were small, clustered and yellow.  We kept waiting for them to ripen, but they stayed yellow.  When they began dropping off the vine, Cindy started picking them and determined that they were actually ripe.  They tasted all right, but were just small and yellow.

Mystery Tomatoes

The Rose de Berne tomato is described as a dark pink tomato weighing between 6 to 8 ounces with good, sweet flavor.  The plant right next to the mystery plant is from the same lot of seeds labeled "Rose de Berne" and appears to be an actual Rose de Berne plant and is certainly producing the big round dark pink tomatoes we expect from that plant.

Actual Rose de Berne Tomato

So then what is the mystery plant and how did we end up with it?  Was it a bad seed?  Did the seeds get mixed up?  I'm not buying the bad seed explanation because the mystery tomato produces clusters of small tomatoes, while the Rose de Berne produces a single tomato on a stem, not a clump.

Cindy doesn't remember ever ordering any seeds for tomato plants that produce small yellow tomatoes, although it's possible that the seeds got mixed up by the grower Cindy bought the seeds from.

Two possibilities are the Galena's tomato  http://www.tomatogrowers.com/GALINAS/productinfo/5882/ and the Garden Peach  http://www.tomatogrowers.com/GARDEN-PEACH/productinfo/5324/.

The yellow tomatoes do have a faint bit of fuzz on them like the Garden Peach, but not what I would call "abundant clusters" of fruit.

It may just remain a mystery.

The Nest Itself

We took the House Finch nest down from the beam over our front porch Friday morning.  The last two fledgling birds flew off on Monday morning, so there was no reason for the nest itself to stay up there; if these same parents or other finches decide to have a nest there, they will construct a new one.

Good thing, too--the growing baby birds don't wear diapers, so the inside of the nest is pretty well coated with bird poop by the time they fly off.

I was curious about the construction of the nest, so I told Cindy I wanted a picture of it before it went into the trash.

House Finch Nest

This shot is of the underside of the nest.  It looks like the birds used twigs and Asparagus Fern to tie the nest together and probably to anchor it to the plastic bird spikes on the beam, and used dead leaves as cushioning for the eggs and nestlings.

We were never quite sure exactly how many eggs and birds were in the nest; we didn't want to disturb the birds any more than was necessary and even when Cindy climbed up to replace the nestling that had fallen out she did it so quickly that she didn't stop to count the number of chicks in the nest.  In any case, the nest was big enough to accommodate them and kept them safe until they could fly.