Tomatogate

Ok, so here's the thing.  I am not a farmer.  Not even close.  I gave it a serious try last year and yielded 2 zucchini and a couple of cherry tomatoes, oh wait and 1 rather nasty looking tomato as well.  Like, I don't know what's wrong.  I even lost an entire tree full of peaches last year.  My thumb is not only not green, it shriveled and gangrenous and is probably ready for amputation.  I decided to really give it another good try this year.  I tilled my soil and added a fresh good amount of top soil.  Which, btw, was a hilarious argument with my 14 year old son on how much I needed for my garden.  He whipped out his fancy math and I used my eyes and spacial abilities and guess who was right?  Yep, me!  I asked my son if it bugged him that I was right and didn't need his equations to do it?  He claimed he was still right even though he was wrong - is how he played that one off!  Anyway.  Determination.  I will yield a crop of something this year, darn it!

I am having trouble with all my plants, truth be told.  My green beans are nothing but a stub of a stem since the wind destroyed them.  My strawberries act as if they don't get watered even though they do.  I lost all my yellow onions, but my red are doing great.  My broccoli has gone to flower even though they have one little stub and not an entire head.  My peppers keep trying to wilt and die on me, but I gave them a pep talk.  I think my iceberg and romaine lettuce are doing pretty good with the exception that I lost one of each of those.  My spinach keeps trying to die as well.  All the pea and cantaloupe starts are dead.   All in all, epic fail!

Now for the mystery of the tomato plants.  I started the season out with 2 tomato plants that would be good for canning, because, I love to can.  Well, one morning after they were watered the temp decided to take a nose dive and they froze and subsequently died.  I nurtured them for a week or two until I decided that they were a total loss and replaced them.  The two new plants looked beautiful and I could just see all the delicious tomatoes getting ready to be born.  Remember that nice talk about the tomato plant in General Conference?  I was going to have a similar success story.  Yes, indeed.  A couple of days ago when I went to go check on things I noticed that one of my tomato plants was gone.  No sign of being dug up. I hardly think a rabbit would have passed all my onions and lettuce to get to a tomato plant.  Last year I learned that rabbits love to pull up onions only to be disappointed that they pulled up an onion.  This year we fixed that with a fence.  Now this fence is barely doing the job, but still it makes the rabbit have to work a bit to get in.  Ok, chalk this up to being an alien abduction of my tomato plant.  Two days later I go out to shower some love on my remaining plant and what do I discover?  No plant.  Completely gone as if it had never been planted there at all.  What the what!  The only explanation that I can come up with is the wind.  Our wind is brutal, but I've never lost an entire plant cut off at the base like that and then just carried away or two for that matter.  I haven't found either of them in some random place in the yard yet.  Just gone. Vanished in the night.  I am beginning to think that I am not supposed to have tomatoes this year. The wind probably saved my family from botulism.  I don't know if I should try yet again or just give up.  Let's face it, it's not like they were going to produce any edible tomatoes anyway, right?