remember all those varieties of tomatoes that we started indoors this past winter? the rainbow of heirlooms, big and small... well this rogue, first-to-ripen-red-cherry-tomato-growing plant is not one of them. a spontaneous garden surprise. most likely grown from some cherry tomato seeds that made it into our compost bin — something that we've witnessed happen here in the past... what happens is, when we disperse out the compost onto the gardens in spring, we are also dispersing out random seeds from food or flowers that have made it into the composter... sometimes the seeds flourish and sometimes they don't. sometimes we see strange stray seedlings emerge and we might pluck them thinking that they are just weeds. however when this volunteer tomato plant emerged, smaller and way behind our already started tomato plants, we recognized it and let it be. thinking for sure it would never make it and catch up to the others. giving it a chance and some space because you never know... then it started to flower and get buds right along with the rest of the tomatoes... how about that? i began guessing that it would be a sungold plant since last year the sungolds were abundant. but as it ripened we saw otherwise... turns out it is red cherry tomato — something we've actually never grown here in our gardens before. a stranger in these parts. and with all the rain we've had this spring & summer, the growing seems to be a little later than normal, making our other plants out there have a few green tomatoes on them (which we are checking daily for signs of ripening) so the fact that this new one is here, ripe and ready to eat? well that is a nice welcomed surprise.