Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 1 JuneA Tie-Dye on 1 June, six or seven leaves sprawled flat and the growing tip still a knot of folded juvenile ones, purple-bronze running up the petioles and along the undersides, low hard light laying the label's shadow across the perlite.Week of 1 JuneA Tie-Dye tomato on 5 June, seen through the diamond mesh of the guard standing over it, its new growth still pale yellow-green at the tip, with low sun raking in from the left and putting hard highlights along every wet wire.Week of 22 JuneA Tie-Dye tomato on 25 June, shaggy with long white hairs that rim every stem edge, four or five plump buds at the center so densely furred they read gray-green, none of them open, its leaves buckled and twisted between impressed veins.Week of 13 JulyA Tie-Dye tomato on 14 July grown into a knot of five or six fused lobes, two of the creases between them split wide into corky-edged cavities lined with rust-brown scar where the seed chamber shows through, its brown sepals splayed flat behind.Week of 20 JulyA Tie-Dye tomato on 20 July, cream-green under soft broad stripes, with a long healed split closed over into a corky tan line beaded along its edge, and behind it one that split further and collapsed into a blackened cavity, in hard noon sun.Week of 20 JulyA Tie-Dye tomato on 23 July, pulled into lobes deep enough to read as a small gourd, with a healed split curving right around its shoulder as a corky tan seam crusted like bark and the skin grown back over on both sides of it.Week of 3 AugustTie-Dye tomatoes on 4 August, five in one cluster and all still striped shoulder to blossom end in dark green over whitish, hung on trusses bristled stiff with white glandular hair and their calyx lobes curled back tight against each shoulder.Week of 28 SeptemberTie-Dye tomatoes on 29 September: two flowers on a forked, white-hairy truss with their creamy-yellow petals swept fully back from a fluted anther cone, a third still closed behind, all in the soft shadowless light of an overcast morning.
