The Upside-down World Of Tomatoes

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Two medium-sized ripe red tomatoes hang from my hanging tomato plants under the edge of my outside stairs. It's kind of a wonder that they ever produced ripe fruit what with the troubles they had. I heard about growing tomatoes out of the bottom of their containers from a friend, and then saw an advertisement and a review about how they did real good that way.

I bought two five-gallon plastic buckets, cut a golf-ball size hole in the bottom of them, and gently worked the leafy section of the tomato plants through the holes. Then, I stuffed some coffee filters around the stalks of the plants to hold the dirt in the buckets and to allow the stalk to grow bigger. With the plants in place I filled the buckets with top soil and hung them from the railing around the deck on the second floor.

The tomato plants took hold and started growing from the bottom of the buckets, and then they turned upward toward the sun. I thought things were doing okay until the weight of the dirt pulled the steel handle out of the sides of the plastic bucket and they fell down on the deck.

One of the plants survived the fall, and that's the plant with the two ripe tomatoes on it now, but the other plant got lopped off by the edge of the plastic bucket where it was turning up to find the sun, and it died after I changed things around so the weight of the bucket and plants were supported by some two by fours.

There is a chance I might be able to grow tomatoes this coming winter in my brother's greenhouse next door. I like the idea of doing it, but the tomatoes I've gotten from my efforts this summer forces me to realize I wan't be able to grow enough tomatoes to feed me all winter. Maybe I'm not doing it right. At least I know not to depend on the handles that come on those plastic bucket.

I'm thinking of trying to use burlap bags filled with dirt to do this upside down business. It keeps the plants off the ground where they seem more prone to disease and creepy crawly things. It's no big deal. If they grow then I'll have some vine-ripened tomatoes, and if it don't I'll just go to the grocery store and buy the tomatoes they grow for shelf life. Yuk!

There was a news story on TV that interested me this morning. It was about how blind people can learn to see through their tongue. This reminded me of researching and reading a lot of material about what's called a Neurophone that purported to teach people to hear through their skin, so I foolishly paid $700 to get them to send a Neurophone to my house.

All this stuff was invented by a fifteen year old boy genius who put this electronic device together to talk to dolphins. It was sponsored by DARPA, of course, and so it had to be involved with better methods of killing people. That's all DARPA does. The idea was to load dolphins up with explosives and send them out to sink enemy ships. They trained the dolphins down in the Florida Keys, and the place is still active. You can play with the dolphins when they not being trained to kill things.

The same system that teaches one to hear through their skin reputedly would allow a blind person to "see" through the skin on their finger tips. It hadn't been worked out back when I was involved in it, but it doesn't surprise me that it would come to this. The reason one could use their finger tips is because there is some many nerve endings in the fingers that have a direct connection to the brain. The skin is probably the most complicated, complex organ the body has.

We finally got a couple of cooler days. It's still getting up into the low 90's (32°-37° Celsius) for the next week or so, but when it's over a hundred degrees and the humidity is also in the nineties, old people and children can die from heat prostration without moving a muscle. I'm hoping the worst of the summer heat is about over.
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