February tomatoes

I posted about my tomato plants in November, December, and January, surprised about them hanging on so long.  Here are my February tomatoes, after a week of unusually high temperatures:

We still have a lot of flowers on this plant.

This plant has fewer flowers, but the fruit was ripe—we ate the cherry tomatoes on Valentine’s Day!

The weather has been very warm and dry—after a wet December we’ve had almost no rain in January or February.  The temperature got over 80°F (27°C) twice last week, which is much warmer than our usual winter highs of 65°F (18°C).  The wet December means that the city’s reservoir is at 85% of capacity, but we really need quite a bit more rain to fill it. The river flow is down to 39.2 cubic feet/second, way below the 25%ile level of 55 cubic feet/second (median 144, mean 313).  We’re not quite a record-breaking low river levels (the drought in 1991 got us down to 4.6 cubic feet/second), but we’re down to levels that we don’t usually see until the rainy season has ended.