Naive Son & Midnight in the Garden of Goo and Evil (#bookswithalettermissing)

(More #bookswithalettermissing, my favorite Twitter hashtag in ages).

Truly, though, the Sons were naïvely optimistic this year when it came to garden tomatoes. We planted our tomatoes in early April, thinking that by the time July rolled around we'd see something like this:

RESULTS NOT TYPICAL

Instead, Texas decided to have its hottest summer in 30 years (and possibly ever, if we keep up the 100+ degree days for another week). At first we were amused by the early high temperatures, thinking that the weather would settle down and only the first round of tomatoes would be affected:

Haha, the heat rotted out one of the tomatoes to look like a mouth! How cute!

Soon, though, we realized that we were not going to enjoy limitless tomato-basil salads, bloody marys, and homemade pasta sauce. In the course of about three weeks one of our crops went from this:

Look how healthy! We're going to have so many tomatoes we'll have to give them away!! :D

 To this:

Oh.

So, 2011 in Dallas, Texas. Not the best year for tomato gardens. I will say, though, that Roland and his green thumb managed to save a healthy dozen or so of the tomatoes before they dried up, and his basil is thriving like a desert plant. And he cultivated a bunch of cucumbers and this beautiful eggplant that was delicious with olive oil & salt:

Survivor: Garden Edition