yesterday a friend of mine convinced me to adopt two tomato plants, comparing them to a stray kitten who will die without my help. The only problem being that I am very good at keeping stray kittens alive, and not so good at keeping plants alive. Seriously, I’ve kept three plants alive in my entire life (four if you count the air plant I had in third grade). I also have a secret: I have never gardened. I used to have a spring ritual of planning a garden in my head, and once in college some roommates and I covered a patch of grass to kill it overwinter in anticipation of gardening in that spot. But I’ve never actually put trowel to dirt and gardened. Add into this the fact that my apartment is surrounded by open meadow and forest and that I am visited daily by my small brown woodland furred friend, a few families of deer, clutches of turkey and a variety of other woodsy beasties, an dgardening sounds too much like a war zone to be enjoyable.
But I took the tomatoes. We planted them in pots (and in an old popcorn gift bucket. See, it’s good I’m a packrat!) and made psuedo-greenhouses/deer protectors by wrapping the tomato cages in clear plastic, and set them on my deck. I got surprisingly attached to them, checking on them every 20 minutes or so, looking at the growing things right there on my deck! Really, to the plants themselves, not just the idea of fresh yummy brandywines in August!
And then it poured. And now I am nervous. Can potted plants, ones that were just transplanted that day, survive the kind of deluge we had last night? How delicate are they? Because I’ve realized that these are my trial balloons. If I can keep them alive and if they can survive the deer I might plant more things in the future. But if my balloon goes down on day one, I may lost impetus to trial it again next year. The gardener in my head would like incentives to grow in the world. Did the thunderstorm just steal that away, along with my brandywines?
