Bursting at the Seams

When I worked in Houston, my co-workers and I would normally eat very sensibly for lunch - a sandwich, taco salad, or soup.  However, on Fridays we would splurge since it was the last day of the workweek.  We would go get a big plate lunch at a restaurant called Zydeco's, or we would get a huge burger and fries and a place called Cliff's, or we'd get a big plate of red beans, rice, and sausage at a eatery called Treebeard's.  On those days, one of my coworkers always wore what he called, "his eatin' pants."

What in the world are eating pants?   Well, they are Sansabelt slacks.  Sansabelt slacks are fitted with elastic in the waistband that make wearing a belt unnecessary. Hence the name - sans a belt.  The elastic in the slacks would allow the pants to adjust to your girth and expand after eating those large Friday meals.  We would tease my friend unmercifully about his pants that "grew with him" allowing him to eat without worrying about his pants splitting or putting someone's eye out if the button on his pants sprung loose after gorging himself.

Why am I telling you this ridiculous story?  Well, there is a gardening parallel. Yesterday it rained 3 and 7/10s of an inch.  The rain just keeps on coming, and there is more on the way this week.  I went out today and picked a bucket full of homegrown tomatoes off of the vines - tomatoes of all varieties are ripening.

Homegrown tomatoes

The rain, on the one hand, means you don't have to worry about watering the garden.  Too much rain, however, causes problems for many of the tomatoes.  Can you see the problem on the tomato on the left in the photo below?

Many of the tomatoes have split wide open...

The split is caused by the rain.  The rainfall causes the tomato to take up rainfall and send it to the fruit.  The tomato itself gets bigger and juicier; however, the skin of the tomato cannot expand in time to contain the rapid growth of the fruit, causing it to split wide open.

This tomato needed sansabelt technology

So I promptly picked all of the tomatoes that had split open and we'll eat a bunch of them and then blanch, core, and freeze the others whole so that we can enjoy them before they go bad.  You don't want to leave split open tomatoes on the vine as insects are attracted to the easy meal that has opened right up for them.  With more rain in the forecast this week, I'll have to keep my eyes on the tomatoes to pick them before they burst.