Vaporware And Upside-down Tomatoes

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Last week I read about a new invention for air-conditioning that is supposed to revolutionize the industry and use less than one third the power to do it. It's supposed to do a better job at the same time. I sure hope this ain't vaporware. I'm as big a fool about believing stuff that I read that I ought not to believe as anybody else.

Sometime the idea itself is so powerful it demands attention, but it don't pan out. Unexpected problems encountered. Legitimate ones. Stupid ones. It peters out. I get all worked up about enjoying myself using it in the future. I put money in a special savings account to be ready for it to arrive on the standard consumer market, and ka-blooey! No mas.

I'm not sure I'll ever be immune from hyperbole. I suspect charismatic people will be selling me hope until the light fades from illumination. I've always been a victim of people who sell hope for a living. Mostly because that's all anybody has to sell or wants to buy. Hope. Without no hope you got no container for faith and charity.

"Oh, mah bucket got a hole in it... can't buy no beer." ~ AU

My plan to grow upside-down tomatoes hit a snag. The handles came out of the cheap plastic buckets I bought at the paint department of Wal-Mart, and they both fell to the outside deck on the same day about two hours apart. What a drag, man. The A-Team notwithstanding, I hate it when a good plan falls apart.

My youngest brother brought his twin grandsons over for a visit, and as usual, these 3-4 year olds headed straight for my digital piano to see if they could beat and bang it to death. Well, they can't. Not barehanded anyway. That's why I don't mind them banging around. That's what going to uncle felix's house means.

The first bucket fell while they were here and while they were the only people upstairs when it happened. After I found the bucket on the deck and the branches of the tomato plants cut off by the bottom rim of the bucket I figured it was just one of those accidents that happen when children are around.

When the second bucket fell to the deck an hour or so later (but didn't cut the plants off) I realized the kids didn't have anything to do with it. I had seen previously that the holes in the plastic where the wire handles attached was stretching because of the weight of the potting soil.

The plants falling forced me to find a more stable way to hold those plastic buckets up on the air so the tomato plants could grow out of the bottom of them. The solution was simple and allowed me to think of a way to put more upside-down plants into full sunlight during the late summer and possibly the winter (with a plastic greenhouse built around them.

The outside decks I built on the east side of my house were intended to provide me with a set of fire escape stairs. I had one existing door to the outside on the east side of my house on the first floor already, so I built a treated lumber deck outside of it to use both as a porch and as a landing for the stairs I would build to the additional deck to the upstairs.

I have a series of four-by-four treated posts buried two feet in the ground to support the upper deck. I found two eight foot studs I had left over from another project and leveled them and plumbed them up to fit on both sides of two of the four-by-four posts.

That way I could sit the buckets across the two studs with the space of four inches between them for the tomato plants to hang down between. My brother came over with the kids and they helped me to lift the buckets up on the studs, then he drove a twenty penny nail through the side of the plastic buckets to the four-by-four posts, and I was good to go.

The plants survived. Even the ones whose branches were guillotined off by the two foot fall to the deck. New sprouts are coming out from the branch nodes of the main stem of the plant already this morning. The bucket that I put on the outside of the deck post should get a fair amount of sunshine throughout the day. The other one not so much because it's partially shaded after midday.

What I'm pleased about is that my experiment with growing upside-down tomatoes is ongoing. It'll probably take a few weeks for the really chopped off plant to regrow some branches and maybe set a few tomato blooms to boot. The other bucket survived fairly unscathed and it should produce something in the next week or so. That's the undamaged plant.

If this works I'll be able to buy some more cheap buckets and expand the number of plants. I should be able to use two four-by-four posts with two 2" X 2" horizontal bucket holders inside my brother's greenhouse for the winter. I'm surprised at how well things grow there when it's cold.
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