It’s all very well consuming vast quantities of fruit and vegetables; but this costs money and you have no idea how many chemicals have been chucked over or fed to your food before it is finally rinsed down and displayed for sale. How much better it would be if we could grow our own produce. Maybe one day, when we have a house and a bit of land, we will do just that; but for now we are limited to what can be produced on our condo balcony.
It’s not an ideal location. It doesn’t get much sun; but it does get more than enough salt-soaked wind to batter and discourage anything that might be attempting to grow.
As an experiment, I purchased a packet of tomato seeds and stuck a few in a pot. Some stuck their heads above the ground, so I picked the most perky and have been lavishing it with love and care (and water) for the past couple of months.
Craig, who knows about these things, reckons I will never get any tomatoes from it; but it has finally produced some flowers.
Now, as anyone who has studied the black art of gardening (or looked it up with Google) will tell you, once you have flowers, tomatoes will follow; and I am quietly confident that we will have several small tomatoes before new year. They might even be red. None of them will be edible, but I think I will have proved a point (don’t try growing stuff on a condo balcony near the sea).
Comments 🔗
2013-09-08| jan sayswell done - perhaps your crop will be the first ready salted tomato ?
2013-09-08| Clive saysPreliminary warning: I do not know what I am talking about.
When I was a youngster [pre-teen] my maternal grandparents had a greenhouse at the bottom of their garden and, in the midst of a pretty productive vegetable patch, used it to grow a mix of grapes [not bad] and tomatoes [very good] as well as using it to “bring on” seedlings before transplanting them to outdoor vegetable plots…
I remember my grandfather showing me round, and in the process he would fastidiously remove tiny sprouts that could be found between the tomato plant’s main stem and the “branches”. I was reminded of this when I saw your picture, because, counting up from the bottom, the third branch on the left of the main stem looks to have one of these tiny leaves growing from the cleft.
Here’s the thing… I vaguely remember being told that it was necessary to do something like prompt the plant to grow taller and stronger, but I am a little bit suspicious that this may have been an urban legend of some vintage.
One thing I do remember was the need to support tomato plants to stop them from collapsing under the weight of their crop. There are a couple of ways you could do this… You could get some thin bamboo cane and build narrow-base “A”-frames over each plant, or you could string some line horizontally above the plants, and then tie of a piece of twine into a vertical run that connects down to the plant stem. The plant will intuitively detect the twine [not too tight, obviously] and wind up it as it grows.
Unlike, say, fruit trees, the deal with a tomato plant is that it’s good for one crop and then gone - you’re not going to get successively better harvests in years to come. So go for it - nothing to lose, right?
2013-09-08| JAN BRIGHTMORE saysSorry - just one season. The “side shoots” you pull out are the little sprouts between the upright main stem and a branch. If you leave them in they will take strenth from plant and you’ll end up with a huge bush tomato & lots of useless tiny red pea tomatoes. I, like you, am learning but have an area slightly larger than your balcony !!
2013-09-08| Spike saysI read that you should remove all the branches below the level of the flowers. I didn’t quite do that because there would have been little left, but I did remove several branches from the main stem below the level of this photo. And the two branches to the right have since been removed. I will go and kill anything else that look anything like a bud.
2013-09-09| ChristianPFC saysI tried to grow Physalis from seeds. Internet says it’s so simple, even fools can do it. I can’t, none of them sprouted. But on my last holiday in Germany, we found a plant that is small enough to be taken by air in my mother’s garden (from seeds from a rotten fruit on the compost), which I took to Bangkok and which is now on my balcony. No flowers yet, but I am content that it didn’t die (yet) under my care.