I didn’t notice this until Steve pointed it out but apparently, we have a tomato plant growing on our patio between our back door and porch swing, growing between the house and the patio’s concrete!

Tomato Plant

It’s actually gotten to be what I consider to be quite large, I took the photo a couple of weeks ago, I guess it was. At my last count it had 23 blossoms on it but, according to my friend, it was taking too long for those blossoms to turn into tomatoes. Yesterday, though, she pointed out two or three tiny green tomatoes with the diameter of about the size of a dime. So I guess I win the unofficial bet – Steve thought it wouldn’t be able to put out fruit while I argued that the concrete on the patio doesn’t go on forever. :P

I think it’s hilarious though. I wouldn’t have known it was a tomato plant if Steve hadn’t told me. I would have thought it was just another weed and would have eventually pulled it… if I had time to weed! As it stands, the wild morning glory has completely over taken our back flower box and is hiding all the rose bushes and squeezing the gladiolas and spreading out of the box.

We also have some wild strawberries.

Wild Strawberry

It’s a little sparse there, I took that photo in May, I think it was. It really leafed up later. That was the first one I saw, in between the hydrangea bush and the climbing rose along the garage. I love the strawberries – it’s obvious they’re feeding the birds and the little wild bunnies. There’s also some underneath the globe willow.

Speaking of the globe willow… the blasted thing is apparently dying. Someone came by one of my photos on Flickr and was asking about her globe willow, telling me of the symptoms it has, and I went – wait a minute, ours is doing that, too! So I Googled and apparently the tree has a disease that’s common to globe willows and is not curable. It leaks this strange frothy sap stuff which attracts bugs to infest it, etc. You can treat the symptoms (bugs, sap) but you can’t stop the disease. Steve is more inclined to just let it go and then replace the tree. I’m sad, I love that tree. It grew so fast and it was so full last year then this year, one side has no leaves and it starts doing these strange things. It didn’t have a very long lifespan if you ask me, we only planted it 6 or 7 years ago. Maybe I’ll get lucky – maybe we’ll move out of here before it dies and I won’t have to see it go.

The magnolia tree and the pine tree next to it are HUGE. The magnolia could stand to be trimmed on the bottom to get it to resemble a tree, rather than a bush. Yeah, I was annoyed with Neighbor Lady when she first suggested such a heinous thing. It really doesn’t matter though. Personally I think Steve leaves it the way it is because it’s not like it’s unhealthy that way and between that and the pine it creates a sort of privacy fence between us and Her. Of course, no tree could stop the hammering at her house, or whatever it was – loud banging – the other day at 7 am. Even Elijah was ticked about that, heh.

So there you have it. The greenery, other than the willow, is overtaking everything. I guess it’s the good weather we’ve had – unseasonably overall for July.