Growing my own

I've always had a romantic notion of being a farmer. I think I've discussed that here before. "Sheeps and chickens and things." Gathering my own eggs. Milking my own cow. Growing my own produce seems especially feasible to me. Unfortunately in the 7 years I've been married (read: moved out of mom's house), we've lived in apartments, so there wasn't any land to work. Well, technically we did live in a house with some acreage... for about three months. It was in the mountains and we lived there during the winter. Not only was it freezing, but the entire lot was covered in redwoods. Very peaceful, quite beautiful. But not conducive to growing anything really.

Anyhoo.

Our current place is no different. We have a nice second story balcony patio, but it's about 6' x 6'. And Joel's manly barbeque takes up about a third of that. My point here is that while the obvious alternative to having land is to create a patio garden with pots, there is not even much room for that. My other sad secret is that while I love the idea of growing things... I'm actually not very good at it. :} I usually end up either loving the plant to death by watering it too much, or on the other end of the spectrum, I forget it exists and it dies of starvation. I also rarely take time to get to know them very well. I ignore instructions like how much sun it should get. Well, if I have a shady patio, there's not much I can do about it anyway. All this adds up to a few failed attempts at patio gardening, in which the plants usually die after reaching about 3" high. Then I give up and throw them out and get frustrated and decide it's "just not for me," that I must have a black thumb and I leave my empty pots in storage for a few more years until I get the courage to try again.

Enter Fred.

He's my new tomato plant. I was walking out of CVS one day and... something about the way his leaves beckoned me and his cheerful yellow flowers smiled 'hello,' I just had to take him home. The fact that he was only 2.99 might have helped, too. ;) What I especially love about Fred is that I adopted him at a mature age. All my other patio gardens I've tried to start from seed. But Fred has taken root, and grown to a substantial height, so I was hoping this head start would help him through the life of hard knocks he was sure to encounter in his relationship with me. :) But I'm really trying to treat him a little better than his predecessors.

So far things are going well. My son takes joy in helping me water him daily. I placed Fred in the sunniest spot I could find, though it's not his ideal, I'm sure. I even took a daring dash out into a hail storm a few nights ago to save him from certain death.

Then. Like magic. The other day, we walked out and found this!

It's a TOMATO!! I was so excited to see fruit on my patio garden for the first time in 7 years. My son and I continue to water and check for developments. I've even noticed a couple of other buds falling and fruits coming along. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself just yet, but I'll confess that visions of greek salads and tomato sandwiches have been dancing in my head.

Maybe I should go out there and talk to him a little bit. That might help.