Growing up my family had a nice little garden along the back of our garage. Every year my brother and I got to pick out specific plants that my mom would grow in the garden but my mom had her own favorites that we got every year. She always did tomatoes and they would grow almost as high as the roof of the garage. The time of year when they would each start to turn red was the best because it meant that all the fruits and vegetables would be ready to eat soon. The garden was never fenced in or anything so my brother, my dog and I could roam around our backyard and go into the garden. One year right about the time that the tomatoes started to turn red and everyone was getting their hopes up for the first garden tomato and we had our eyes on the first one to be ready. It was a nice big red tomato that was only a couple days away from being picked. Then the next day it was gone. My family started pointing fingers and accusing someone of eating it or picking it but no one would confess. A couple days go by and more tomatoes start to get red and the original tomato was more or less forgotten about. About the time of the next tomato being ripe it too went missing. Now everyone was perplexed as to what was happening. As soon as the tomatoes would get really close to ripe they were disappearing. Then another plant fell victim to the mysterious fruit thief when mom noticed cucumbers that had massive bites taken out of them. This is when we realized that there were other suspects that had yet to be considered. We then watched my dog through the window of our kitchen one time when we let him out and watched him ever so gently pluck tomatoes off the vine. At the time my Uncle Rob was in town who thought he had a great idea on how to stop the dog from eating tomatoes. He hollowed out a tomato and filled it with hot sauce and cayenne pepper spice. We left the tomato in the garden where my dog had just eaten a tomato. The next time we let him out everyone watched my dog walk up eat the tomato without hesitation. In no way did the dog seem the least bit bothered. Needless to say we got a fence installed.
-Ramzi
