I used to have a green thumb. I grew everything from flowering cacti to large hanging plants with even larger names. I even got, to my husband’s untenable joy, my Christmas poinsettia to flower at Easter time. I grew herbs in tiny pots on my kitchen windowsill. Yes the thumb was definitely green. Not so much anymore.
I planted tomatoes. I got four. Two plants, two tomatoes each. I also planted patio tomatoes. Remember when they were called cherry tomatoes? Little round tomatoes. Nothing’s changed, but now they are either patio tomatoes at 1.99 a pound, or cherry tomatoes at 2.49 or the newest addition to the tomato family, grape tomatoes at a ridiculous 2.99 a pound. I got a whopping 13 of those. Two salads full on harvest night.
Last year my son gave me two Topsy Turvy planters. Like me he probably couldn’t sleep one night and saw an infomercial convincing him that tomatoes should be grown hanging upside down because….well, just because. But last year didn’t work out so good. The upside down plants never really took to the whole reversed growing regime and simply laid there. Not one tomato. I blamed the bees for not pollinating correctly but I think it was probably the sporadic (at best) watering. This year I started them with big, healthy plants from Home Depot. (because where else would you buy big healthy plants?) I had my husband hook up a hose on my deck so I could water on a regular basis. The plants grew large and lush. The bees must have found their way to my deck and suddenly I had little yellow flowers turning into green tomatoes. And if we liked green tomatoes it would have been a success. But the tomatoes just hung there, staying green until they rotted. So I started picking them green, pre-rot, and allowed them to ripen on my kitchen counter. I even put some in brown paper bags which I heard expedites the ripening process. I still remained with hard green tomatoes until they turned into hard green tomatoes with mold. I threw them out. Hey, Beefsteaks are only .99 a pound in season.
I planted basil and oregano. The basil grew tall and thrived until I decided to start picking the leaves to use in my tomato gravy (yes I say gravy, not sauce) when it suddenly folded over and limply lost its great green color. I guess that was it’s way of expressing its discord at being violated. So, no pesto tonight either. The oregano never really looked like the dried flakes I buy at the supermarket so I just enjoyed the smell and harvested none.
The only other edible things I attempt to grow were peppers. Green Bell peppers, and as I had seen how well I did with the ‘green’ tomatoes I figured this to be a slam dunk. Wrong! The plant thrived the peppers did not. I got one pepper the size of a walnut which I watched carefully each day so as not to let it go from green bell to rotten produce. The pepper grew to almost fist size and was hours away from the big harvest when a squirrel brazenly scaled the deck, hung upside down from my Topsy Turvy planter and confiscated my single beautiful pepper and absconded with it into the tree.
Did I mention that Key Food has a lovely produce department?
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