Our First Tomatoes

It's not a large accomplishment, I know, but it feels good to say that we've successfully harvested our first tomatoes. The plants we put in pots on our second floor roof just outside of our third floor window have been bearing fruit for weeks now, and finally some of them are ripening and turning red. We plucked the first four a few days ago and a fifth tonight. Delicious! They taste exactly like every tomato I've ever had and at the same time they're just a little bit better.*

I'm jazzed. Next summer I want to go for the full monty and build a big wooden planter box on legs, set it out in full sunlight on the roof, and fill that bad boy up with tomatoes, cukes, peppers, green beans and who knows what else.

I think I'm starting to understand why my grandfather's been so devoted to gardening his entire adult life.


* Not true. They taste just the same as every tomato I've ever had. The romantic in me would like them to somehow taste sweeter, what with the personal working of the soil and the sweating from the brow and all**, but they don't. They do taste good, though.

** They're in pots. There was very little "working of the soil" involved in the process, and the only reason I sweat is because our attic has no air-conditioning. The romantic in me*** likes to imagine that I toiled and labored extensively to raise up our bumper crop of five tomatoes, but I didn't.

*** I don't think I'm as much the romantic as the romantic in me imagines I am or you wouldn't be suffering through all of these disclaimers. Instead of calling myself out on my silly flights of fancy, I'd simply be flying them.