The Great Tomato Experiment

As I've mentioned before, my mom is a skilled gardener. We have always had a garden. Our house in NY had space for a pretty large garden, and most of our fruits and vegetables were home-grown. We had a couple years in an apartment when we first moved to NC - that must've been tough for Mom. But once we moved into our NC house - the house where my mom still lives - another garden was planted. It has pretty much taken over the back yard at this point.

Okay, anyway....my point is that my mom is a gardener. And I am not. I don't know how I grew up not picking up this skill, but I didn't. My little sister seems to have it - pretty quickly after moving back to our hometown and buying a house of her own, she started planting a garden and suddenly new the names of all sorts of plants and flowers. Looks like she has the gift.

I now have a house of my own, and we've at least done enough landscaping to include some new flowers and bushes. I don't know the names of most of them, which exasperates my mom, but I'm trying. I'm now going to try something more daring: tomatoes. There is no comparison between a fresh tomato and one bought in a store. If I grow nothing else, I'd love to have a few tomatoes and some basil. My older sister sent me a packet of seeds, and I also picked up a couple seedlings from the farm up the road. Here's what they looked like about a week or two ago:


I'm going to let you follow along on my adventure to grow tomatoes. I am nervous. When I asked my husband how many we thought we'd get in our first year, he said "nine". Well, I guess I'd be happy with nine. But my mom got frustrated with my pessimism and said I needed to be more optimistic. I'm working on that. Wish me luck!