Posted by melannen on 2013-05-06 23:57:14 UTC and edited at 2020-02-10 02:50:33 UTC
PermalinkI think I have tomatoes! Last year we planted four cherry tomato plants from the local nursery/produce stand (one flat worth) and three of them just sort of spindled along, sickly-looking and not growing much, putting out one fruit here and there. The fourth one became The Tomato Plant That Ate The Local Metropolitan Area; I was still pulling a dozen tomatoes at a time off of it in late October, and it completely engulfed a Forsythia.
So since we've had tomatoes come up volunteer the next year before, I decided to scatter tomatoes from that plant around the garden-y areas and let them go to the soil naturally. (If I had tried to grow tomatoes from seed I'd've failed miserably, but 'let fruit rot on the ground' is hard to screw up.)
And we have what I'm pretty sure are tomato seedlings coming up in a few places! They're very small still, but I'm keeping an eye on them. Who knows what (if anything) they'll do for fruit, but it'll at least be interesting to see.
3 comments
Oooh, exciting! I'm going to try and grow tomatoes from seed this year but I'm not sure I'll be very successful. Your "let fruit rot on the ground" method sounds more my speed.
Tomatoes are great volunteers, in my experience. You might get rather odd shaped fruit if you started with a hybrid variety last time, but as long as they're tasty!
Yeah, 'let fruit rot on the ground' is definitely the low-effort way! But letting storebought things come up from seed can definitely have interesting results sometimes. Someday maybe I'll acquire some actual heirloom varieties, even if I have to do it the hard way.