The Bounty Begins

When you start with a packet packet of Sweet & Juicy Harlequin F1 Hybrid tomatoes, it looks so small. The 3×5 packet says it contains16 seeds. 16 sounds like a small number. You would think a supply of seeds that small would need lots of help and nurturing to arrive at a harvest to fill a small basket. Oh how naive… I am such a novice. The basket will fill, overflow and then cover the ground, possibly the whole back yard and I might lose a child or two in the avalanche.

I see about 6 to 8 green fruits in each vine stem… 3 fruity stems in each branch… 4 branches on each plant. That means between 11-hundred and 1,500 tomatoes.

I’d better set up a vegetable stand soon. Maybe the children can sell them instead of lemonade in the culdesac.

So I bought a book

… recommended by D.P. Nguyen in her square foot gardening in Nashville blog 

The book/bible on square foot gardening is by Mel Bartholomew and is about as basic a read as you can get. I’m skimming through, looking for these great and wonderful insights– the secrets successful gardeners keep to themselves unveiled at last… nope.
Mel tells us the truth we refused to see, that we approach gardening in much the same way we approach American life: great gusto and energy, followed by lavish spending ($40 on seeds was lavish) and overindulgence (in indoor seed-starting and letting kids dump the full packet of seeds into the dirt) and finally growing ennui  which inevitably leads to disaster and the death of the dream and a flood of the one product the kids and husband won’t touch.

I will try not to go that way. I’d rather learn. So we’ll deal with the tomatoes and work on more abundance next year in the crops the kids enjoy… avoiding the alalanche.

Look at Gracie enjoying the season’s first carrots, and the end of round 1 of the beans.