Tomatoes

As many of you know, we are working towards partial self-sustainability through agriculture.  We hope to grow a lot of our own food.  Lots of people ask how our gardens are doing and we kind of cringe and say that we're working on it.  So far we've had huge success with fruit trees and then from the garden cucumbers, yard long green beans, okra, and a tropical spinach.

We had this lovely idea, as we came from our temperate climate, that whatever you plant in the tropics grows.  While we do have pineapples, bananas, starfruit, and mangoes in the backyard, we've learned the hard way that you just don't sprinkle your vegetable seeds out there and always produce in great quantity.

So, we've begun experimenting with other options to grow tomatoes.   We've learned that you can graft tomatoes to a common weed here.  We did this and got a couple tomatoes before the plant died -- apparently we had chosen an old weed to graft onto.  We've now planted more of these weeds and we have another potential grafting host to try, so we can try this technique again in the future. 

We've also tried growing tomatoes under the eaves of a roof (thanks to Amanda) and this seems to be working.  Already we've eaten a couple tomatoes from these plants and there's more growing.  Perhaps these are thriving because they aren't getting direct rain or sun?

We also just picked a few wild cherry tomatoes we found growing somewhere.  If we plant the seeds from these we may have yet another option for tomatoes in our gardening future.

As you can see, we still have lots to learn and lots to try out in the garden.