For those who are interested in my botanical exploits (hi Dad!), you may remember that I have had an amazing gift for most of my life. I can kill any plant within 48 hours simply by looking at it. It’s my mutant power. However, this past summer, for the first time ever, my botanical efforts paid off and my basil and rosemary both flourished. The blueberry plant died, but in the immortal words of Meatloaf… two outta three ain’t bad.

This year, emboldened by my success, I’m getting a little more daring. The rosemary (carefully packed in pine needles all winter) is doing very well and I kept a shoot from the basil plant indoors all winter and it’s now planted next to the rosemary.
But here’s the real adventure: I’m growing tomatoes. I haven’t participated in tomato growing since I was a wee sprout myself (when Dad’s green thumb overpowered my fledgling plant-killer mutation) but I decided to order some seeds and start FROM SCRATCH. Whoa boy, we’re having fun now!

I ordered from the Seed Saver’s Exchange, which is a fantastic resource for heirloom breeds saved by actual growers and not owned by Monsato et al.  I got Eva Purple seeds as well as Sugar Sweetie cherry tomato seeds. I planted the sugar sweeties a few weeks ahead of the Evas and I’ve watched them grow from a crate of dirt to tiny little green shoots to lanky, leggy sprouts. They are just about ready to go in the ground (just as soon as it stops raining!). The Evas are currently in teacups, pots… anything I had lying around to put them in (a lot of pyrex and loaf pans), lining my home office window until they’re big enough to go in the ground. I got one more tomato plant, already started, from Whitton Farms a few weeks ago at the farmers’ market; this one is a Cherokee Purple and is definitely ready to go in the garden.

Here’s the giveaway: if you’d like a Sugar Sweet cherry tomato seedling, just leave a comment (be sure you leave your email address!) on this blog post and I’ll randomly choose winners.  Yay!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 9:21 am by Kat and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.