We have tomatoes! I mean actually growing in our “garden.”
They are growing in the derelict planter box in the narrow
planting area between the patio wall and
the public/common lawn. There are also green peppers growing in a pot by the doorway.
This is incredible news for a brown-thumber like me who’s been
called a herbicidal maniac. Even the way the tomatoes are growing reflects
that.
I had bought a you-don’t-have-to-do-anything planter box
last year. Everything was in it: growing mix, fertilizer, and anything else
that was needed except water and your choice of seeds. I added those, but I
think that in an overdose of caution I must have put too many seeds into the
box. True to the advertising, the seeds grew -- all of them. The tangled mass
of stalks and leaves yielded a total of six stunted tomatoes. Even so, I was
not much disappointed because in view of my record with this sort of thing
I hadn’t let my hopes get too high.
The planter box was discarded, removed from its prominent place
on the patio railing and dropped into the narrow planting area and forgotten.
And now it’s growing again. Unattended and mostly un-watered, it has a sizeable
green tomato and another smaller one, and numerous blossoms that apparently
turn into the tomatoes.
The green peppers, which came out of nowhere, are small but
perfectly formed, and I have eaten two. Not quite as flavorful as the store
kind, but that’s only because the commercial growers work all sorts of treatments
on them. These are organic; nothing in that pot but soil mix. The tomatoes are
presumably working on what remains of last year’s fertilizer, but they’ve never
seen any pesticides, and that’s close enough to organic for me.
We’re looking forward to a real treat. Store tomatoes aren’t
worth buying. They have no flavor, and I remember reading that, tested for
vulnerability to collision damage, they outperformed Detroit automobile
bumpers. I’ve been slashing them apart and smothering them with black pepper to make them edible. And all that
seems about to change. If the desert winds keep warming the days as they usually
do this time of year and the nights don’t get too cold, we could have a real harvest. I can taste them already.
