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One of the upside down tomato plants I set up has 26 golf ball sized tomatoes on it. I thought the plants would be dead by now. Before the first frost I hope to put them in my brother's greenhouse next door to see if they will survive the winter and keep producing. That would be a neat trick.
The fact that I planted two different varieties of tomatoes and only got a fair number of fruit the size of a golf ball (instead of the huge slicing sized tomatoes I yearned for) from both varieties is just weird. Not only did I plant two varieties of tomatoes, but I planted one plant the old-fashioned way in a large pot right side up, and two plants emerging from the bottom of two five-gallon plastic buckets.
My initial effort was a feeble attempt to have some vine-ripened tomatoes to eat myself, instead of the commercial tomatoes grown for shelf life that are sold at the franchise grocery stores. This was not my first effort to grow tomatoes since I've lived at this location.
A few years ago I really worked hard to prepare a small garden plot for the sole purpose of growing big, fat one-slice tomatoes to make tomato sandwiches with. My memory of how easy it seemed for my parents to grow garden vegetables apparently convinced me it was a piece of cake if I prepared the ground first.
I dug a ditch by hand about two feet (61 cm) deep by two feet wide for about eight feet (2.43 M) and filled it about half way up with cow manure, then I topped it off with commercial bags of topsoil. On top of that I placed the black plastic stuff that keeps the weeds from growing. When I got ready to plant I punched holes in the black plastic cover, and set out the commercially grown tomato plants in the dirt beneath it.
I even had a passel of 1/2 inch stainless steel poles I'd been given as a gift to tie the plants up to keep them off the ground. The plants grew prolifically, produced hundreds of blossoms, then fruit, all of which developed mosaic "end rot" disease... and the whole deal was a bust. That broke my heart for growing tomatoes for years.
The idea of growing tomatoes in pots I could keep up on the second floor outside deck came from my sister-in-law giving me an ornamental cabbage plant one fall as a gift. She thought some living green color around the drab room I spend most of my time in would be cheerful.
Cabbage is one of the commercial produce vegetables the local farmers grow in this area. I don't know much about it. My parents didn't ever grow cabbage except in their gardens. I did know they were set out in the fall and were able to survive all but the most severe hard frosts. We have moderate winters here, and severe hard frosts can be few and far in between.
The ornamental cabbage and kale plants they sell at Lowe's are attractive because they have a interesting layout of their leaves, and the fact that the leaves have curly edges draws my attention when I pass near them. I took it upon myself to see how long I could keep them alive by taking them inside when the hard frosts arrived. Otherwise I watered them and left them outside come what may.
The kale plants (I had two varieties) lived well into the winter season. At some point I took them over to my brother's greenhouse, and while there they went to seed, and died as expected. Not the ornamental cabbage. It sat over in a corner and got watered when all the other plants in the greenhouse were watered.
When the warm weather of spring outran the frost I brought the ornamental cabbage plant back over to my house to sit up on the second floor deck where the rabbits wouldn't get at them. It was that one advantage that probably inspired me to try to grow some tomato plants in pots in the same area to keep them away from small animals and worms and other pests who attack plants from the ground up.
The ornamental cabbage plant is still alive. In fact, it's thriving. Little cabbage plants started growing out of the side of the cabbage stalk which has "eyes" that sprout. The sprouted plants growing out of the original cabbage stalk do not have the original ornamental look to them. They look more like regular cabbage plants.
That's what I'm using them for. I snap off one of the sprouts and either either eat them raw or boil the chopped plant up with country ham fatback, salt, and pepper. Recently, I've been adding turmeric spice to explore what it's exact taste is. I grew up eating boiled cabbage with fatback, and that allows me to detect the exact taste of the turmeric as a standalone.
One day has passed since I recited one of my own poems to my high school classmates. I didn't just spill out the words rotely, but performed the poem as a one-act play. It was selfish of me, I suppose. I was the only-est one with anything to say when the class president asked if anybody had any comments to share.
I'm happy they liked my performance. I can still see some of their old faces plastered with awed smiles today. They really like me. They've liked me all along. I only needed to give them the chance to find out for themselves when they couldn't help from showing it. I suspect my nervy arrogance will open the door for others to act out and reveal themselves. It's about ti-me. '-)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
