Aquaponics - Tomato

There's not a lot of truth in anything you can say about gender differences, but I think men, as a lump, grow a lot of tomatoes*.

I suspect it's because it's colourful, plentiful, tasty, normally involves a lot of crap, and most of all, fast and easy.

I never liked tomatoes as a kid, or a young adult, but as I hit middle age I'm starting to think growing tomatoes is exactly what a middle aged man should be up to. I've been at it for only a few months, and already I've been pruning buckets of foliage, flowers, and even tiny fruit, as the two tomato plants threaten to take over the entire growhouse.

I've cut it back to something around the size of a large family dog.

But in the last couple of days I've started to see colour.

It looks like this.

And I'm getting a little excited.

I'm starting to wonder if people grow these things because they taste so much better than the supermarket varieties.

Of all the fresh(ish) produce you can buy, I'm guessing tomatoes, strawberries, and maybe bananas has been messed with most.



As a kid, I don't remember fresh bananas from Koki Market staying fresh for quite as long as the things I've had in the bottom my fridge for weeks, I also remember being a kid in South Australia where we had a large strawberry patch where you could hunt around for fresh strawberries, but if you ever picked a stack of them to take inside, in a bid to become more popular, they tended toward mushyness within only a few hours.

Tomatoes, I don't remember.

But I'm pretty sure they are not meant to bounce after months off the vine, and I'm also pretty sure they are not supposed to have all that white skeletal structure in them.

I hope they are as delicious as I'm building them up to be in my head.

*Really spell checker? You spell the plural of tomato tomatoes - see, not only did I not eat them, I didn't even write their name.!






An aquaponics tomato is just a tiny part of 120 Things in 20 years