Local green thumb grows large tomato plant

Published 3:00 am Friday, October 30, 2015

Alice Johnson has a green thumb.

She has always known that she had the gift but she thought that gift had gone dormant.

“I used to grow all kinds of things and anything that I stuck in the ground grew like a weed,” said Johnson of Brundidge. “But, I don’t have a place for a garden now so I just don’t garden anymore. I grow a few flowers on the porch but that’s about all.”

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But Johnson decided this summer that she would stick a salad tomato plant in a pot and see if she still had a green thumb.

She did and she does.

MESSENGER PHOTO/JAINE TREADWELL Alice Johnson stands with her tomato plant that she planted in the summer. The plant continues to grow.

MESSENGER PHOTO/JAINE TREADWELL
Alice Johnson stands with her tomato plant that she planted in the summer. The plant continues to grow.

Her salad tomato plant is still growing and still producing like it’s the height of the summer season.

“I knew I had a green thumb but I didn’t know it was this green,” Johnson said, laughing.

Johnson has supplied all of her neighbors with salad tomatoes. She has left some for the birds and the bees. She has put the little red tomatoes in salads and wrapped them in bread.

“Why, you can even eat them in bunches like grapes.”

And, the tomatoes just keep on coming.

Just how many tomatoes the little plant has produced, Johnson has no way of knowing. But she decided to make note of, possibly, the last salad tomato harvest of this long and plentiful growing season.

“I just got me a pen and pad and started counting,” Johnson said. “I counted the ready-to pick-ones and the green ones and the new ones coming on. At 90, I thought I’d counted them all and then I found five more so, here at the end of the growing season I have 95 salad tomatoes on my plant.”

If Johnson has a secret as to how her one salad tomato plant has been so productive, she’s not telling.

Just little potting soil and a good daily watering seem to be all the tending she has done.

She doesn’t mention any triple-anything or any miracle solutions or granules.

She just has a green thumb and she has 95 late-coming-on tomatoes to prove it.