Tomatoes have nine lives

If you are considering starting indoor vegetable gardens, the first plant you should sow should be tomatoes, preferably 'Tiny Tim' or a similar variety for containers. Few plants are harder to kill than them. The reason why I say that? I stopped watering mine a month ago, and they are still setting fruits.

Of course, the fruits could have been better, but they are fully edible and still beats the ones you get at the grocery.

I've planned to butcher those uggly plants for a while, but things get in the way. Our family economy is still a catastrophy, so my attention is pointed to other things than gardening. On the other hand this has given me the chance to do something I've procrastinated for a long time; starve the thrips away. Every window will be emptied and cleaned, and then I'll leave it bare for a while (don't know how long yet) before I start the vegetable cultivation cycle again. I'll probably put a small seedling nursery in my study, to have nice plants for the house once the quarantine is over.

Keep your fingers crossed for my success.

And the family of indoor vegetable gardeners is growing. The Indoor Garden is an ambitious blog with lots of usefull information. Wellcome!

Finally some space for the roots

Took me two and a half day to get it done, and it was worth it. All my soil is sterilized, I've mixed some new potting soil and the bonsai tomatoes has got new homes. Four cuttings from the old tomato plants keep them company - I hope that at least one of the methods will be successfull.

I got the tip about taking cuttings from tomatoes from the Swedish seed preservation society "Föreningen Sesam" (link in swedish only, sorry). Since I'm convinced that tomatoes are among those species that can handle most mistakes and are friendly to newbees I decided to give it a try. I haven't used cutting as a method often so I followed a rough basic plan. First I cut a good looking twig (healthy green leaves, perhaps flowers but not fruits) taking more rows of leaves than I needed above surface. The I cut away the lowest leaves from the stem - if I'm correct new roots will sprouts from the leafe joints - and put the 'deleafed' part into the soil. To finish I packed the soil gently around the stem and then put a plastic bag with a cut off corner over the plant. Now I'll leave everything alone to allow the plants to settle.

The bags you see on the picture are protective packing I saved from those glossy magazines I've subscribed to (and some free ones that are sent to me weather I like it or not). They are pretty sturdy and I don't have the heart to throw good stuff away. Since I don't put food in them (who knows what they put in printing colours these days) I've despared over my rapidly filling drawers. Finally I've found a use for the bags!

The tomato window again

My current pride. Tomatoes and chard. Fits the available space and will be delicious when cooked. Yum!

Tomatoes and softener

Well, those tomatoes didn't taste much. I have a feeling that if this fruit* are put to ripe in a bowl instead of on the plant loose the ability to form taste, which means I may have been prejudiced. Or I may have picked one that wasn't ready yet. In any way I can rely on the fact that we'll have new tomatoes in a few weeks. Cultivating Tiny Tim is pure joy, the plants are dark green and of the modest height of fifty centimeters (about one and a half foot). The first flower clusters have lost their leaves, which mean I'm watch over them to see when the first fruit forms - I never grow tired of that.

The advantage of growing tomatoes is that they are sensitive to pollution. If there is anything unhealthy in the air or the water they'll start wither. The interesting thing with these and my previous plants is that neither seems to suffer. The first plants were watered with water from our dryer - water that smelled of non-ecofriendly softener. I've changed to an ecofriendly one; you tends to be squeamish when the softener returns to your own stomach via the vegetables you grow. Perhaps I didn't need to worry since my old tomates did fine. However, I can now bask in the warm and cosy feeling of being ecofriendly.

*Yes, tomato is a fruit, but used as a vegetable.

Experiment

This sunflower was picked by mistake at the allotment yesterday. I'm no friend of big and bold flowers, so I'm surprised how well it fits into our kitchen - which is decorated in turqoise and mild yellow tones. And while the flowers lights up our kitchen table I can study its finer details fit for angel bookmarks.

Sunflower is said to be edible, and who am I to refuse an experiment? I picked a yellow leaf and put into my mouth - with a considerabel amount of suspicion. Mom taught me that flowers are poisonous, and the voice of your inner mom is never silent. In addition to that the leaf tasted like perfume, that oldfashion kind with lily of the valley and lilac base, and left a bitter aftertaste. I have to admit I wondered if I would be sick and spent the rest of the evening watching over my stomach. But, I survived!

If I would use sunflower in my cooking I would go for Middle East inspired food, where rosewater is used regularly and where that hint of perfume is desirable. Hm, perhaps it's already used? The climate is right for the plant down there, and there's a good will to use plants creativly.

The small bowl contains another experiment. I picked the tomatoes from my previous plants before I tore them all down. By then they where minute, and I wanted to see if they could ripe eventhough they where dark green. They've taken a few weeks to blush, and they collected some dust bunnies meanwhile. Like most tomatoes made for commersial cultivation their skinns is pretty thick, and it'll be interesting to see if there's something more inside when I try them out for lunch today. I'll post some further report tomorrow.

Size do matter

Looky here. The library window looks tidy again. The Tiny Tim tomatoes seems to thrive and have already sprouted their first flower buds. Little chard seedlings are peeking up above the soil, and they'll soon grow to fill the window. On the other hand none of these plants will become as tall as their predecessors*. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a proportional window display this time.

*Chard reaches a modest height of fifty centimeters compared to the ten meter vines of the indian spinach. 'Tiny Tim' is a miniature tomato, and won't reach the two meter height of the plum tomatoes I grew here before.

Short statusreport June

I can now harvest tomatoes enough for a sallad from the plants I sowed the twentyfourth of february, and the indian spinach are out of control. That's why I went online and ordered more seeds for my gardens...

NightShades: Potato and Tomato

Patti Moreno again, she has uploaded one of the few serious vids on tomato cultivation, topped up with facts on potatoes.



(And yes, I fell for the cartoon version of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". Yesterday I spent at least one and a half hour watching old episodes on YouTube. B-movies have a special place in my heart.)

Serious tomatoes...

I knew about "Attac of the Killer Tomatoes", but I didn't know that the film was so popular that a cartoon was made from it. It's amazing what you learn from YouTube.

Tomato From the Black Lagoon

Disposable pallets for the garden

I've spent my day cutting up pallets. Globalen in Uppsala has given me their disposable pallets and I plan to rebuild them into raised beds for my allotment. I do realise it's ironic I want to raise vegetables in containers outdoors too - I'm a lazy person. Raised bed gardening makes it easier to weed, and you have more possibilities to fend off slugs. And it's possible to mix a supersoil for dense planting. However, I'll put them up this autumn, I need to build them first.

The big news of today is that the first tomato is blushing. This may be a small thing for others, but I'm so excited I'm jumping. Soon we'll have fresh indoor tomatoes!

The importance of chosing the right kind of seeds

The first thing you need to do if you want to grow a giant pumpkin is to buy seeds from giant pumpkins. Simple as that, some of this wisdom also applies to indoorvegetable gardening, but in our case we need to look for "suitable for containers" or "miniature" on the envelope (note that the last term is relative, a miniature redwood is still as big as an ordinary pine). To be honest I'm quite generous on myself in this case, still I say it's an rule worth following.

Take a close look at the photo above and you'll realise why. My tomatoes hails from commersially grown plants - as you may recall I got the seeds from an sustainably grown tomato from the mall. In commersial gardening tall plants are good, in most cases you have good greenhouses and an army of persons willing to climb ladders during the harvest. Indoors in a normal flat the same qualities turns out to be troublesome. I'm lucky to have a 'two story' room, since my plants are about 150cm (five feet) tall both of them.

So I'm sad to tell you this, my dear plants, but you won't be the parents for future indoor tomatoes. My next round of plants will be 'Tiny Tim'.

Oh bother!

Me picking leaves for the sallad.

The tomatoes drink more than two bottles of water each day. I refill the bottles, but I don't like the sound of roots breaking when I press them back into the soil. To solve the problem I cut off their bottoms to be able to fill them while they were still in the pot.

That was not a good idea. The water ran straight through bottle and soil in no time. I should have realised that it needed some sort of suspension to make the system work, but I've seen tomatoes watered this way outdoors. Outdoor tomatoes, on the other hand, have an endless buffert of soil beneath them. Duh!

This strikes me as a good exemple of mistakes you have to do in order to become a good gardener. The skill improves greatly by those few occasions when you do everything backwards. So, after wiping the water off the floor and replacing the bottles, both I and the tomatoes are happy.

Happy tomatoes for real

I've removed the pots with "Mini Happy Plant" from my tomatoes. That goo didn't have a chance to provide water fast enough for the plants. Instead I used an old, well established trick; you drill a hole in a soda bottle cap (I used small ones here), fill the bottle with water and shove it cap first into the soil. The hole in the cap allows the water to flow slowly and the plants can drink as much as they need. I could actually hear slurping sounds from the bottles when the sun was at its hottest.

Finally I'll won't wake up to discover that I'm minutes late for watering, and that the tomatoes have withered to the point that they seem dead as doornails. A hefty dose of water has revived them before, but it stresses the plants and I may end up with bitter tomatoes. Now it'll be interesting to see how often I'll need to refill the bottles.

Looky, looky, looky here!

There it is! The first tomato!

Indoor Gardener bruschetta

It's easy to be swept away by gardening books. Everything seems so fun, and if you're lucky enough to fall for plants that are easy to grow, everything after that is a breeze. Only when autumn comes do you realise that you have a problem. Suddenly you have squashes as big as rugby balls*, the chard are bigger than you and your turnips are humungous. Being a newbe you realise that those glorious gardening books may tell you that this and that vegetable tastes good, but they seldom expound on how to cook them. What do you do with all this? How do you prepare them to make them taste good instead of just being healthy?

An indoor vegetable gardener has to find the answers fast, because the gardens produce all the year around, and if you're not alert you'll soon drown in leaves. (You may remember that I had problems with a lively sage last year.) My nasturtiums are now big enough to harvest from, so I've started to make up recipes. Nasturtium tastes like cress, a strong flavour that lends the plant to use like something in between a spice and an leaf ingredient (use it like leek, if that's a better description). It grows extremely fast, so I haven't any other homegrown vegetables to combine with.

Thanks to tomatoes from the grocery store (don't worry, they are ecologically grown), I've been able to experiment with a bruschetta. I've yet to find the right balance between tomato, nasturtium, salt and olive oil, but I wanted to share so I urge you to have fun experimenting with the recipe. (My big dream is to use not only homegrown tomatoes, but homegrown oil from the tiger nuts.) This is what I had for breakfast this morning.

Indoor Gardener Bruschetta
1 portion

• 1 slice of white bread
  
• 4-6 cherry tomatoes
  
• 4-6 nasturtium leaves
  
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
  
• salt
  

Chop the tomatoes and the leaves together, put them on the bread (toast it if you have the patience and want to add some extra luxury), drip some olive oil over it, put on some salt and eat.

***

*I've yet to see a newbe harvest their squashes when they are the right size, ie. 20-25 cm (8-10 inches).

A day in my life

This is a still-life over my day. My brain feels like that grey fluff in the plastic box, so I've spent a great part of the afternoon making more of it. It's egg cartons and mug stabilisers that I patiently tear appart. The plan is to use the fluff as bedding in my future vermicompost. I hope the worms will eat it - they can live in woodchips too, but then they don't eat it, and this stuff is something in between wood chips and teared newspaper. Whatever happens making carton fluff is just the right level of activity when you are tired and are watching a movie.

The eggshells displays the reason why I'm in a hurry. These are the tomatoes I sowed ten days ago. Since I'd gathered the seed myself my expectations where low, and I have to admit that I'm surprised. Not that it has discouraged me - this afternoon I collected some more seeds from mini plum tomatoes that happened to be lying around. These have been organically grown, so it'll be interesting to see how they make it in the competition.

The magazine is a swedish gardening mag "Allt om Trädgård" (~Everything About Gardens) and symbolises my shopping spree. I'm now the proud owner of a jigsaw, a flourescent lamp, some chains and extra wood. But I don't have all I need yet, so I suspect I'll need to do another spree soon. Another reason for chosing "Allt om Trädgård" is that the swedish mother blog of Indoor Gardener (Parkettodlaren - it's hard to translate the title, but it would be something along the lines of "Indoor Floor Gardener") is mentioned in an article. It's a good one about growing herbs and vegetables indoors, written by Lena Israelsson, who is one of my big inspirations in gardening. If I was rich I'd buy every book she has written. And when she calls herself "parkettodlare" I'm tickled pink! I'm very honoured and glad that our number is increasing.