You Grow Girl™

I’m sure some of you know that feeling, when you just can’t pull your eyes away, and you feel the constant need to touch and stroke and caress. Marveling at the beauty and perfection that belongs to you and only you, that needs you as much as you need them in turn….

I’m talking about my potato-leafed tomato seedlings, of course. Has one ever seen anything so beautiful?

Even among my Vast Subterranean Seedling Emporium, they stand out, their large, cabbage-like leaves hovering over all the other plants, as if they’re about to take wing. Honestly, sometimes I feel tempted to see if there’s a VW bug or perhaps a family of pheasants hiding under those leaves.

Here are some pictures of the rest of my seedlings

– note the ones on boxes, and the etch-a-sketch nearby.

Yes, it’s possible to use all sorts of things to bring the seedling babies closer to the lights! I think the book is something econ-related from business school – clearly, the most use I’ve gotten out of the thing.

And, I’m pleased to note that I’ve managed to cut back drastically on the number of varieties I’m growing this year! Yep, I’ve brought it down from 163, all the way to…..155? It was a tough call, but the spit-it-out-of-your-mouth-bad Plum Lemon will just have to fend for itself elsewhere. Okay, so I was resoundingly unsuccessful at cutting back on varieties, but I did grow only a couple of most of them, so that helped a bit. Talk about a dilemma when potting up, though! Which to cull, which to keep….oh, the agony. No wonder there’s a tomato named Sophie’s Choice.

As for how last year ended up, we try to not talk about that around here, lest we want to see me shaking my head in horror, wide-eyed and pale. Because the last two summers have been the crappiest on record as far as tomatoes are concerned (2003 will henceforth be referred to as The Shortest Growing Season Ever, 2004 as The Summer of the Black Death). Thus, I predict that this year will either be spectacular, or we’ll have snow in June and a plague of locusts in July, chewing everything down to nubs.

For those who wanted tomato seeds last year, I’m sorry I couldn’t send any, but the total lack of tomatoes made it a little difficult to save seeds! Yes, it was a total bust. My backyard is somewhat shady, which in a normal year just reduces yield – in a cold, rainy year (SotBD), it means zero, yes zero tomatoes from most of my plants, many of which succumbed to various fungal diseases. Then there was the community garden plot by my mom, who now lives in a very resort-esque development in the far western ‘burbs, for people 55 and older. Sheesh, send ME there – it’s very cushy. Anyway, she got a plot, and the theory was that I’d plant the tomatoes and such, and she’d get the bountiful harvest. Ha, I say, HA! What actually happened was that the Powers That Be apparently bought their “mulch” from Stan’s House of Cheap Low-Grade Toxic Mulchlike Crap….because whatever that stuff was, it literally killed everything. I planted about 100 tomato plants towards the end of May, and when they became stunted and purple, I thought it was due to the monsoon rains, the cold, the crappy clay soil. So I bought more dirt, mounded it up around the plants….didn’t help. Then I put in more plants, AFTER the floods had ceased…and those became sickly too. In fact, everything in ALL the plots looked sickly. I have pictures of tomato plants that didn’t grow beyond six inches, yet managed to spit out one tomato in their last gasping breaths. Poor things.

It finally occurred to me that something was drastically wrong when seeds that I had planted came up YELLOW. This indicates a serious problem with the soil, because seedlings basically have all they need to nourish themselves from their seedcoat, which is why you generally don’t have to fertilize seedlings until they’re a few weeks old. Clearly, whatever they piled on top wasn’t composted. It looked crappy, had big pieces of plastic and metal and wires and other stuff, had a very weird shredded quality to it, and I now suspect that it was garbage from some landfill that was too “fresh,” not properly aged. Yes, compost is good, but if it’s new, it’ll burn and kill plants. So, all that hard work for nothing! ARGH! Almost nothing, that is, because I got to hang out and commiserate with all the old codgers out there (can we have a shout out to all my pals?!), all of whom have more energy than me and my friends put together. They totally rocked, and I can’t wait to see them this year. And to all of my older Sun City gardening buddies, thank you for fertilizing and watering my tomatoes to try to get them to perk up, because you felt sorry for their pathetic states. Didn’t help, but much appreciated!!

So, that’s the story, Morning Glory. And now that we’re all updated, we’ll try to focus on the positive. The seedlings are still happily nestled in their cozy basement home (here’s a Black Cherry seedling - when they’re as wide as they are tall, that’s a good thing!)

The summer weather hasn’t yet turned to total crap (it’s allowed to be cold, it’s April), and my mom’s Community Garden administrators have sworn to everyone that they put ACTUAL SOIL in the garden this year, not toxic wasteland detritus. Maybe that was their way of using deep-thinking strategic Sun Tzu Art of War tactics on us – set expectations so low, that if we get anything this year, we’ll be happy. They’re probably right.