Hiding under a goodly bunch of foliage is a bract that I've been watching for weeks-- the first of the yellow blossoms dried back to show hard dark green balls about the size of bb's. They stayed pretty much the same for so long, and then began to widen out. So dark green.
I decided that a watched tomato doesn't ripen, so to speak, and ignored these things, watching instead for signs of productive behavior on the Brandywine plants that were growing large and bushy.
Today I see about five billiard ball sized dark green globes forming on my Brandywine bushes. They are a "beefsteak" tomato, so it will be a while before they grow to size and get that transparency that tells you that ripening is just beginning to happen.
Meanwhile, in the past two days, that first bract of the Cherry Tomatoes has produced three round finished products. They showed themselves off proudly under their lacy greens and now we have properly harvested, hoisted, celebrated and consumed them while standing next to the plant. I popped that first fruit, warm from the sun, into my mouth, bit down slowly on the taut shiny red outer skin and felt the luscious innards burst inside my mouth-- too flavorful and sweet to describe.
This time of year I remind myself that in a month or so I will be truly suffering under the weight of too many tomatoes. They will be coming too fast to ever eat, and what I can't give away to neighbors I will have to process in some way. Throwing away lovingly grown tomatoes is not an option. So in August I'll be out there in the back yard (not to heat up the kitchen) in the sun and humidity boiling ripe tomatoes, chilling them in ice water, and peeling off the skins of hundreds of these things. The only thing keeping me from wishing the whole mess gone is the certainty that what goes into the freezer in August comes out of the freezer through the winter months and gives us such pleasure.
I figured out that you can throw peeled and seeded ripe tomatoes into a slow cooker with a few other ingredients and they cook themselves into a stew that is "to die for." You can dump the stew into freezer zip bags and lay them into bread pans to freeze.. Then you take back the bread pans and stack the blocks in the freezer. There's puree and tomato juice and homemade "V8"; and I can even chop up fresh seeded tomatoes, add a bit of lemon juice, and stick them in the freezer as long as I am going to use them cooked later. These chunks of red get thrown into stews and soups and gravies all winter long.
Jersey tomatoes. There really is nothing like them. Nothing!
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