This time of year gardeners are beginning to swim in a sea of vegetables from the garden.  Most have already become utterly sickened at the thought of another zucchini dish.  Cucumbers may haunt the dreams of gardener's around the country.

However, many are enthusiastically harvesting their tomatoes.  There's just something about a bountiful harvest of ripe, red tomatoes that is good for the soul.  These plump, juicy fruits have a culture all their own and are among the most popular of plants that grow in an average vegetable garden.

However, all is not always well in tomato-ville as this gardener can personally attest to.  Life can get busy, and it is not always possible to give a garden and the plants therein the even care they need.  Did you read that?  Even care.

So it may be with great disappointment that some overtaxed gardeners are monitoring their harvest and noticing bursted or cracked tomatoes.  It won't happen everywhere, and it won't happen all the time.   But it definately does happen.

The culprit is rapid growth.  That rapid growth comes from a sudden dose of water, as comes from several days of heavy rain, or a large dose of fertilzer.  But that's not usually enough, and here's the key.  Cracking from rapid growth occurs under these conditions primarily when the plants have been deprived of even watering or feeding, respectively.

So in this gardener's specific case, the summer has been relatively cool and the watering has been very sparse.  Several days of heavy rain got the tomatoes to ripen and grow alright, but it happened so quickly that they split their skins!

So a word of caution to the gardeners out their who are in a similar situation: the garden must be evenly watered and fed throughout the growing season to prevent sudden spurts like this.  That way, even if the rains do come, the plants have been conditioned to accomodate the rapid growth that will inevitably follow.