I've always grown tomatoes--well, maybe not every year, but most years even here at Castle Yonder as soon as I got enough planter beds in sunny locations.With our new handicaps, health-wise, I can no longer tend a veggie garden. I'm not planting many annual flowers, either. Arthritis combined with lack of breath does not react well to bending over, kneeling, hoeing, or spading.
But I've been intrigued by the catalog pictures of the kits they're selling for "upside-down tomato" plants, so sent for one. Rocky and I started working on it Sunday. We are so slow these days, but we managed to get it all unwrapped and read the directions on Sunday. On Monday, we put the green bag into the wire cage, and I went to the nursery to buy a tomato plant. I couldn't narrow it down to one, so I bought two, one for the bag and one for a flower bed that had just the right space open where I had pulled out a dead rose. (Roses don't do well back here in the woods.)
Yesterday, Tuesday, we mixed the soil included with the kit, put it into the bag, and planted the tomato, a determinate variety, called "Patio," which was the recommended kind to use. We put the water reservoir on top, filled it up, and Voila! we have a tomato garden, if you can call one tomato a garden.
Well, I'm the proverbial farmer who closes the gate after the horse has gone, because I started watching our chosen spot for the amount of sun it gets. This deck that you can see in the above picture (that's me pointing at the top leaves of the tomato hanging out of the bag) is off the basement and has another deck off the Master bedroom up above. We hung the tomato from the rafters of the floor of the upper deck. You don't know how many times I've sat back here and kept moving my chair to get out of the sun. Well, evidently not at this time of the year! Yesterday, I discovered it's pretty shady back here and I don't think our tomato is going to get the required 6-8 hours of sun a day. I think the overhang provides too much shade. Notice all the shade in the photo which was taken around noon.
So, I'm looking around for another place we might hang this. Problems...problems...hmmm...gives us something to think about besides ourselves!
