Office Tomato

May 27, 2011

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Office Tomato Update and Taste Test

When I last spoke of the Office Tomato, I described a plant that was quickly headed towards its final days. It had three ripe fruit and I was hoping to keep the plant going long enough to turn out a forth.

Amazingly, I managed to keep it alive to get not only a forth, but a fifth. There was even a sixth that made it to full size, but it stayed green.

The plant did die back. I have cut the stem down to a six-inch stub and am planning to put it outside to see if I can coax a second life out of this thing. Office Tomato 2: The Resurrection! And why not? I’ve got nothing to lose but a bit of time spent caring for it. My main concern is that the plant was not at its best, and that should a resurrection occur, I could find myself with a new, albeit sickly or disease-riddled plant. As I type these words, I can’t help but think of bad Zombie films, Reanimator, and Frankenstein. As if my resurrected plant is going to take on a life of its own, turn bad,and go on a rampage.

I need BRAINS! BRAINS!

The Taste Test
My second reason for bothering to keep this particular plant alive is the fruit. When I decided to nurture this particular volunteer plant, I predicted that this would all just be a bit of fun, but that the tomatoes themselves would be mealy and unpleasant. NOT SO! They were delicious. Very delicious. We ate the first and the last few straight up with a pinch of salt. The skin was a bit thick, but the insides were juicy with a nice tang. They were not mealy in the least. I made the mistake of leaving the last few on the plant longer than I should have as I did not have time to take pictures. You can see a bit of splitting in the full tomato depicted above. Tomatoes that split tend to turn mealy very quickly. These didn’t! They were just as juicy and delicious as the first.

Unfortunately, I’m still not sure exactly which variety this is. I grew a limited number of varieties on the roof last year (the volunteer came up in a houseplant that had summered on the roof), but I still can’t pin-point which one it was. I’ve narrowed it down to ‘Czech’s Bush’ or ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ I’ve been growing both varieties in pots for years. They are excellent, early producing varieties that do well in mid- to large-sized pots. Both produce similarly sized, red fruit. The leaves looked right. The only difference is that ‘Czech’s Bush’ is a very stocky, hardy plant. It’s short, thick, and rugged. This plants wasn’t any of those things particularly, but I wonder if that could be the result of a lack of light. It was grown in a window through the dim days of winter after-all. And it was never as leggy as other windowsill-grown plants have been. Either way, I’ve also saved some seeds from one of the fruits and might try growing those out this year to see if the plant shape changes at all in outdoor light.

The experiment continues. I hope my experience has inspired you to try your hand at an office (or bedroom, or living room) tomato this year. For the best chance of success, I’d go with dwarf varieties as they tend to be a bit more forgiving about a lack of light and can tolerate a very small space. But then again, I had luck with a larger determinate, so you never know. Gardening is an evolving never-ending experiment. Have fun with it!

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April 19, 2011

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Office Tomato Update (April 19, 2011)

It has been about a month and a half since I last wrote about the Office Tomato and it’s about time for a good news/bad news update.

The good news is that I returned from a 10-day trip to Thailand to two ripe tomatoes and a third that is very nearly there. I feel lucky to have made it this far and was equally impressed that our friend and house-sitter, David, was able to keep the plant alive, especially since the weather has been unseasonably cold and grey.

The bad news is that the reign of Office Tomato is coming to an end.

I had hoped that the plant would be able to hold on long enough to make it outdoors, but with another months or so to go before tomato planting time, it is clear that a quiet retirement soaking up the sun in the fresh air is not going to be a reality for Office Tomato. The hard work of producing fruit indoors in an inadequate lighting situation is taxing all of the plant’s resources — it is literally on its last legs.

But first, let me backtrack:

I took this photo on March 26, just before heading off to Milwaukee. Already I could see that Office Tomato’s days were numbered and that its health was on a downward slope. I observed that the leaves had begun to curl under and had lost their luster. They just weren’t as green as they should have been.
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March 8, 2011

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Accidental Tomatoes in My Office

Back in January I introduced you to my office tomato, a mystery volunteer plant that I began nurturing for its delicious tomato leaf smell. Well, it looks like Mystery Tomato is about to offer up something else that is delicious — it’s making fruit!

Here is a photograph of my plant in the window it lives in, taken just this morning. The plant is over 2 feet tall now. I have steadily upgraded it into bigger pots as it has grown. It could have been taller, but I buried a large portion of the stem when I last upgraded it as a way to ensure a more stable root system. Its current pot is 9″ deep and 10″ wide at the top.

Surprisingly, the plant isn’t leggy. It’s growing in a south-facing window and it seems to be getting just enough light to keep it happy. Any less and I’d be concerned. One of the biggest challenges around growing tomatoes indoors through the winter is the lack of sunlight. For the most part, the sun isn’t bright enough and the days are too short. Tomatoes need a lot of sunlight to produce fruit. If you want to try growing your own, I’d recommend growing dwarf varieties that are less demanding and will fit underneath supplemental artificial lights. My plant is much too large for that so the most I can do is turn it regularly so that it receives an even amount of light on all sides, and hope for sunny days.
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January 25, 2011

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Tomato Plants Offer Cheap Therapy

Those of us in the northeastern reaches of North America are something like just past the halfway mark to spring. The days are getting longer, and even though I am thoroughly discouraged by endless applications of boots and layers of heavy clothing, there is some hope. Spring is within a reasonably foreseeable future. There are times when it feels like I can almost touch it and smell it, and yesterday afternoon I realized that I can! It’s growing just behind my desk.

On Twitter, I mentioned the tomato plant I am growing in my office. I don’t know which variety it is as it came up as a volunteer in one of the houseplant pots that I must have put out on the roof last summer. It’s got to be one of the determinate varieties that I grew, but who’s to know? It’s a mystery. When it was sturdy enough, I carefully pulled the little seedling out of the soil it was sharing with an epiphytic cactus, no less, and gave it a new pot with more appropriate soil.

As of now, in the dead of winter, the variety isn’t important or worth speculating about. What matters is the smell, that beautiful, invigorating, strong tomato smell. It is probably the smell I miss most through the winter months.

I try to spend a few minutes with my plants each day, not just for their sake, but for my own. I keep many of the most aromatic and softly textured plants in my office where I have easy access to touching and smelling them. They keep me going.

I’ve always considered tomato a productive, workhorse plant that is grown with the expressed intention of producing an edible crop. But yesterday I realized that their usefulness goes above and beyond the food we put into our mouths.

When I mentioned my plant on Twitter, a few people chimed in immediately about the smell and how much they missed it. It’s still a bit early to start tomatoes in my area, and yet I’ve been enjoying mine for over a month already. It got me thinking that there is no reason why we can’t or shouldn’t grow a tomato plant indoors, in the off-season, for no other reason than our own pleasure. Even if we can’t provide it with a strong enough light that can take it all the way through to spring and a life outdoors where it will produce tomatoes… so what. Isn’t it worth growing for the smell alone?

That’s cheap therapy.

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