Locavore In Training

Heather’s Note: My friend Penn lives in Baltimore with his wife and has been learning to how to combine a desire to grow his own food and city living. When he isn’t an urban “farmer”, he works in IT and writes for blogbaltimore.com. I’ve asked him to share his experience here, to show another spin on local food.

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There are a few things that I regret from the first time I tried to grow tomatoes. If they had not happened, who know how bad (good) the crop would have turned out.

I have a small patio in the back of my row home that gets about 4 to 6 hours of sunlight each day. This area was enough to make my herbs happy so I figured, why not try tomatoes. My wife loves then, I'll eat them, and they taste oh so awesome with Buffalo mozzarella, basil, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. I grabbed a pack of seeds, of a type of tomato I do not remember. I know that the picture on the front was of a large red tomato chilling happily on a big vine, it was Home Depot, and I panic when I am indecisive.

I also picked up a large round pot from Home Depot that I figured would be a decent home for a few tomato plants, I believe it was this guy. I picked up more potting soil and a cage cause this guy was big, and I wanted lots of growing room. After getting things home and setup, I started to break out the seeds into the pot. I made sure to read the directions, which mind you, are really geared towards people with farms or large tracks of land where they have long lengths of soil to use for planting. I had a pot.  A big pot, but still... a pot.

I'm going to break for a minute in an attempt to build the suspense of my mistake (stupidity)...

The package made it seem like I should be putting one seed every three quarters of a foot, roughly. In my mind, I was thinking how bad of an idea this could be because not all seeds are successful (very wrong thing to think!)

I've included a drawing of where I placed my seeds, I'm pretty sure the pack of seeds that I bought contained close to 50 seeds total....I placed all the seeds in the holes, every single one.....

For weeks, I watched and waited. I tended the pot to make sure there was enough water. I didn't want to flood my seeds but I'm also impatient. I moved it when I was off of work so that it stayed in the sun longer. I was by this pot's side twice a day, morning and night, to cheer it on. I ultimately feel that the reason I was so adamant about making these tomatoes the most perfect tomatoes ever was because (as I mentioned) my wife loves tomatoes. She doesn't just like to eat them and buy them, she looooooooves them. I envisioned 4 sprawling tomato plants that would produce a bountiful harvest of tomatoes to last us through all of the summer.

If you've managed to follow along so far, and you understand gardening, you've probably already guessed my mistake. 50 divided by 4 puts me at about 12 seeds per hole. I'm pretty sure my first sprouts were roughly 6 to 8 a hole. Boy, was I excited to finally see sprouts! And, boy was I confused about what the hell I was going to do with more than 25 tomato plants in one pot!

Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to take a picture of all the seedlings that sprouted but I do have photos how things started to turn out.

It had seemed that after a bit of time, the tomatoes decided to weed out the weak themselves. This was good because now out of each of the 4 points, I had only roughly 3 to 4 tomato plants growing. These guys were hungry too! I bought fertilizer and I would water them in the morning and in the evening because they would just suck that stuff up. I guess not knowing better, they didn't care it was city water.

It was a magical and fun time. The effort felt worth it. The results were awesome (and tasty).

I quickly learned that the cage I bought for my tomato plants was not large enough! One cage to rule them all was the wrong answer, Home Depot Gandolph.

I also learned that my back patio was probably not big enough either! These guys had decided to use fallen telephone wires to kind of hoist themselves up to the top of my back wall! I guess they were trying to climb up and make a break for it?

I met some good friends along the way! This guy was on my basil plants, he hung there and ate flies for a month. Samurai Jack (who I now believe is a she) was a fun little guy. (S)he would rove from plant to plant devouring insects. Samurai Jack eventually left

But (s)he eventually came back! Either that or he took off because this was a female looking to eat him. If that was the case I wouldn't blame him for packing his shit up! Maaaaan eater!

In the end it was fruitful (yes, tomatoes are fruits!) I had probably harvested close to 9 tomatoes which is no where near what I could have grown.

I unfortunately spent a very long weekend away with close to 3 days of 90 degree weather and this is what I came back to: I was sad, there was no amount of water that was going to fix this. The stems had lost their strength and the plant collapsed on itself. I was truly upset. There was a lot of effort and lost opportunity in those guys.

I've taken the lessons I learned from this adventure last summer to improve this summer. That's a future post that's still in the works.