Growing up my father always had a large garden in the yard. During the summer months it supplied most the herbs and vegetables that we ate. When winter came around my parents would freeze things like tomatoes for sauces. I always took this for granted but now that I’m older I’ve grown to appreciate the satisfaction in growing your own vegetables and the savings it provides. Living in a condo doesn’t make this easy.

My father is getting on in years and has now substantially decreased the size of his garden to a few square feet. His tomatoes have always been a main stay in his garden and he would distribute them to all the neighbors. He has been cultivating two species for over 20 years. The first is what he calls beef heart (explicitly not Beef steak) and the second is an Italian plum tomato. These bad boys grow to be bigger than softballs and are all meat with very little water. This year I’ve decided to try and grow my own tomatoes in hopes that I can continue to cultivate these seeds until we get our own home.

The main issue is we live in a north facing condo which means very little sunlight. Tomatoes need more than 6 hours to produce adequate fruit and we get 4 if we’re lucky. Though fruit would be nice, at this point we would be content to have the seeds sprout so we can distribute them to friends and family. They will have to keep the tomato lines alive until we get our own home.

This is a little green house we got from Walmart for about $8. The individual planting pellets will make it easy to distribute the plants.

Here are the wonderful seeds. Cost…Free. Apparently this is how you save seeds from year to year. You just dry them on some cardboard for a few days and you’re good to go.

This is the balcony at about 2 in the afternoon. Dark and dreary until about 4 or 5 PM.

Well this is my quest to not only grow my own vegetables but keep a tradition alive. Wish me luck.

If you got any words of wisdom I’d love to hear it.

-mfd-