A Fish Story

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Subcutaneous fat interests me. My interest did not arrive from contemplation, but because of a TEDtalk by an old woman who worked as the secretary of the anthropologist that derived the theory that humans didn't evolve from living in trees to running around on the savannas chasing grazing animals for food. He proposed they evolved straight from the ocean. The proof this guy offered was based on subcutaneous fat.

Other ocean mammals also have subcutaneous fat. It's the fat layer under their skin that keeps them warm. Whale blubber, seal blubber, walrus blubber. Human blubber. Chimpanzees and the great apes don't have subcutaneous fat. When humans get old, neither do they. That's why aged people's skin is so thin and wrinkled. The subcutaneous fat goes away. It's disappearance causes them to get cold.

I went to bed early last night. I worked out the woods again for a while. Long enough for me to get cuts and scrapes on my old skin that will take forever to heal. I'm wearing two large band-aids with antiseptic cream built in. They work pretty good and absolutely helps my old skin heal faster.

After I had spent an hour or so out in the woods I moved my remaining tomato plants over to my brother's greenhouse. We had already discussed where to put them. His wife was born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon. She had to be consulted about what goes where in her greenhouse.

My brother had dug a post hole for me to build the framework to put the bucket with the plants growing out of the bottom. That's how I knew he had consulted with his wife and she was okay with me erecting the frame where we put it.

It was a simple affair. My brother had closed the end of the metal hoops the plastic sheeting is stretched over with some preserved wood 4"X4" posts. I placed another 4X4 in the post hole and then used two 2"X4" studs to nail the studs to the sides of the standing 4X4's to create the open space between them.

The cheap plastic buckets with the hole in the bottom of them were placed on top of the 2X4s with the tomato plants dropped down between them. The frame is located on the southwest corner of the greenhouse in order for them to get as much of the winter sun as possible.

I fixed two of the plastic buckets I bought for less than $4 a piece at the paint department of Wal-Mart. I thought I could use the metal handles to hang the buckets up with some strong twine. That didn't work because the weight of the dirt was too much for the plastic the buckets were made of, and they come out right away. That's why I had to set them on a ledge.

The tomato plant in one of the buckets got chopped off when the handle on the bucket broke and fell down on my outside deck. I stuck the broken stalk in some root hormone powder and then thrust it up into the bottom of the bucket again. It worked for a while. Yesterday when I set the buckets on the frame I saw the effort had failed.

The one tomato plant that lived produced a few small tomatoes during the summer. Since growing tomatoes upside down is an experiment for me that I tried for the first time I didn't know what to expect, and so even a few tomatoes were satisfying.

In the late summer and early fall (to date) lots more tomato fruit showed up. I counted the tomatoes on that one bush and there were 25 tomatoes about the size of a golf ball. All of them look very healthy. One of them fell off while I was moving it. I'm hoping the remaining one will get ripe.

My brother and sister-in-law are watching what happens like a couple of red-tailed hawks. They've been using the greenhouse mostly for keeping their potted plants safe from the frost and cold of winter. If these tomatoes work out they'll probably start growing winter tomatoes themselves. They may not be any tastier than the store-bought tomatoes, but at least we'll know where they came from.

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