Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Colored Pencils and Encroaching Tomatoes

Since Sophie's taken an interest in pens and drawing on paper lately, my mom gave me the idea of letting her play with some colored pencils. I think she had more fun dumping them out and putting them back into the metal tube. She drew a pretty good scribble, though.


On a completely unrelated note, I want to show you my tomato plant. I have almost zero experience with gardening, so when I found out that you can plant almost anything here, I decided now would be a good time to stretch my wings a little and get some practice. I planted a bunch of flowers on one side of the porch. On the other I planted one tomato, one bell pepper, six red onions, cilantro, basil, sage, thyme, and rosemary.

About 90% of that "bush" is one tomato plant. You can see the pepper plant on the right and the sage and rosemary on the front below.

The tomato plant decided that it was going to plow over the rest of the edibles and make its way into the house. There are probably measures I could have taken to prevent this. (i.e. not getting a ginormous type of tomato and planting it right next to everything) My poor pepper plant has two hopeful little nubs on it and the onions, though still growing, are flat on the ground. The sage and rosemary are still holding on, but the cilantro and basil have long since gotten stalky and gone to seed.




Yes, I used a tomato cage-thing-whatever-you-call-it. It's practically horizontal now.

Oh, and all of my flowers died except for two hot pink bougainvilleas, which I hear are sort of temperamental.

Two more summers to figure out what I'm doing in a climate that's forgiving. Maybe I'll just plant tomatoes. They seem to like it here.

6 comments:

Kathryn said...

You should see the chaotic tomato plants in my backyard. I bought bigger, heavier cages this year thinking they could hold them, but no. Now one of the cages is being held up with my shovel stuck into the ground!

I'm not sure there is any way to control tomatoes around here.

Dave & Chels said...

Mmm...you have everything for salsa growing in your yard! What I wouldn't give to be able to go outside and grab some cilantro. I have every intention of gardening someday, but not until we have a yard.
Colored pencils are a good idea. Crayons are a hit or miss at our house. Sometimes B's really good at coloring on paper, and other times I will find crayon marks on the linolium floor. Or our kitchen chairs. (Good thing they are dark wood.)

Natalie said...

Chels - I thought having a cilantro plant would be great, too, but I didn't know they were so short-lived. You've got to keep pulling the leaves off on a regular basis or else it will start flowering and the leaves will turn bitter. I think I used about a half a bunch worth and the plant costed about $2.00. Yeah... I think I'll just buy mine for now on.

The Rogers said...

Tomatos grow like weeds out here. You can plant them in anything and put it any where and they will grow huge. We planted some in a small window box for Justin one year and they got huge really fast we got about a dozen tomatos off of it then it got to big for the house so we tossed it LOL.

Suzanne said...

I don't think my last comment took, so I'll re-do. I'm so proud of you, Nat! The tomato plant looks fantastic. The fruit is only part of the reward of gardening. Marisha has recently taken to gardening - I'm so excited!

Let me know if you need a killer Pico de Gallo recipe.

Natalie said...

If it's the pico you brought to the office a few times... I already have it. :) And yes, it's definitely killer.