How Tomatoes from a regular super market taste? Do they have taste at all? Well they look at least perfect. But most of them never got in touch with real earth.
In spring on a sunny Sunday we went for a walk to the park of “Blühendes Barock” to enjoy the first warm days. At this day there was also an gardening fair. We started to have a look on all the nice and sometime useless things they offer for your garden. Finally we stopped at the tomatoes and started dreaming about how wonderful it would be to grow your own tomatoes. Real juici tomatoes full of taste. Unfortunately we don’t have a garden. But we have a balcony. So we decided to give it a try. I remember that we should have somewhere in basement some flower pots and flower earth. So we bought three small seedlings.
Once arrived at home, In went downstairs to the basement , to find the earth and the pots. The earth I found. But nowhere this pots I had in my mind. They went to garbage when tidying up last time. What to do? It was Sunday and no DIY store was opened. So what to use instead? Ah. Maybe this old wooden vine box? Ok let’s try it. To protect the wood from humidity I put a big plastic bag inside and fixed it with duct tape. I love duct tape! You can use it nearly for every thing. Now the earth. Mmh. Next problem. It was not enough. What to do? Somewhere I read that tomatoes like sandy ground. Ok. So let’s go downstairs to the playground. ;-)
Finally we did it. My doughter was very proud to water the tomatoes the first time and I was happy to show her that tomatoes don’t grow in super market.
I didn’t expect that our project would be very successful, as the environment on the balcony (very hot during the day) is not optimal for tomatoes. But they grow and grow. So we needed to fix them. It turned out that the vine box was really handy as we could just mount some wooden bars in order to fix the tomatoes by stings.
Beside daily watering the tomatoes got from time to time a little bit Guano.
Finally we had each day a few tomatoes to which we really enjoyed.
As this project was so successful and great fun for my daughter we will repeat it next year an upscale it a little bit. This year we grow only so called cherry or cocktail tomatoes. Next year we will try it with the big and even more tasty ones like “Coeur du Beuf”.