Not a Gardener

You might recall my disaster when decorating my mother’s birthday cake. I have to admit, I’m not much of a gardener either. Or at least, my skills are limited to very specific plants.

A couple of weeks ago we went to the local garden centre, and bought some tomato plants. Last year we grew some tiny orange tomatoes that were wonderfully sweet, so when we saw that there was a whole range of weird tomato plants available, we decided to try something new. We walked along, reading the labels, and selected tomato plants that would produce black tomatoes, and green tomatoes, as well as the more common red tomato. All very exciting.

We planted them in grow-bags, and waited to see what would happen. The leaves on the green tomato plant grew larger than expected, and I commented to Husband that it didn’t smell much like a tomato plant. But then, we have never grown green tomatoes before (obviously I don’t mean the unripe normal variety) and so perhaps the plant had been cleverly engineered. We know a little about clever engineering of plants, because Emm’s girlfriend is a plant scientist and she works on things like disease-resistant wheat.

I have also experienced plant engineering with the only flowers I am skilled at growing, which is dahlias. My dad always grew dahlias, and he showed me how to harvest the seeds in the autumn. If you blow away the chaff, you can plant the seeds the following spring and produce a whole new plant. Very easy. But the colours change. So, seeds from a bright pink plant will produce dahlias with a white stripe in the petal. If you then collect seeds from the white-striped flowers, the next generation will have more white, and so on, until eventually all the flowers are white. Some clever plant genetics have obviously been involved to produce the brightly coloured dahlias that we buy in shops.

However, this turned out to not be the case with our green tomato plants. When Emm’s girlfriend came, she looked at the plants and informed me I was growing cucumbers. I guess that explains the unexpected shape.