Getting surprised by tomatoes growing on my 4th floor balcony which I never planted.

Life is Like a Box of Chocolates

That lovely, corny, philosophical line uttered by Tom Hanks as Forest Gump keeps coming back to me for several reasons, one of them being that there is truth in it and that there is good as well as bad that life brings in little surprises that tickle us in little ways.
I have several flower boxes that hang on the railing of my balcony in which my mother always had flowers.
I’ve been too greedy to grow flowers, which may sound odd, but I figure that if I grow stuff I can eat instead of stuff I can just look at I’m getting a better return on my investment of time, pennies and energy. (The pennies is for the seeds, which have cost much more than pennies for some years now)
I’ve kept several non-edibles from mother’s days and nursed them well. I lost mother over 15 years ago but plants sometimes outlive us.
There was a container with several tropical type things that I separated. One of them, a type of palm, just grew and grew and I transplanted it. It outgrew me and, finally, I took it down into the blah lobby of my apartment building (not my building; just the one in which I live).
A disagreeable German woman on the first floor grumbled that it would die there for lack of sun; she hijacked the plant and transplanted it once more, and takes it out into the yard for the summer where it is not always happy, but it now scratches the ceiling and gives the lobby some character in the winter.
A tiny cactus was tricky to transplant but it became very happy in a pot of its own even though I didn’t have a proper sand-soil mix for it. I water it now and then and it has tripled or quadrupled in size.
Then mother had a Christmas cactus which flowered each Christmas season but stopped in recent years. I would consider it a miracle if it again started doing what it is supposed to be doing. But it’s family in a sense so I give it a bit of moisture now and then.
I’ll read up on it. Perhaps I should be doing something more to make it happy. It’s an inherited child, not my own and my care is more one of duty than love.
The one inherited child I’ve taken to more is a pot with show-off violets. I suspect that mother had it for years before her death. My guess is, these violets are in their twenties. They hardly seem rooted but keep producing flowers week after week. My guess is, they’ll stick around long after I’m gone if someone takes them and looks after them.
There had been a Ficus tree in a big pot on the balcony that I hadn’t been aware of and by the time I did become aware of it, it looked like it had given up the ghost. I felt dumb and guilty about it and watered it daily and it came to life and started growing like trees in documentary films where they use time-lapse photography which really becomes a bore of a cliché.
I had brought it in for winters but it became too big for my already overcrowded living room and I gave it to a neighbor who later moved and gave it to someone else.
My pride and joy, however, became a 4th floor balcony farm. I added some big pots and grew tomatoes because it is impossible to find tomatoes in stores that had been allowed to ripen on the vine. I think they spray them with something that lets green-picked tomatoes turn red while not ever ripening and they are tasteless.
Of course most outdoor grown tomatoes have developed much thicker skin than they had when I was a kid on a farm. Plants, having annual generation, evolve much faster than humans which need over 20 years to adjust to changing global conditions.
The sun has become stronger and tomatoes responded by growing thicker skin. If mankind survives, people will probably grow thicker skin, too; though I find new generations being relatively think-skinned in a mental sense.
I’ve grown various herbs on the balcony because they are relatively expensive to buy and it’s nice to have free oregano or basil or dill on hand now and then. Just last week I made up five jars of dill pickles with my own dill. Back in California I would do this with my own grown cukes and garlic, too, in my fantastic garden that produced stuff quickly and voluminously.
My street here in Toronto boasted great oaks and maples, some over a century old perhaps, but they caught some bug and the city keeps cutting them down. I’ve not been able to learn what it was.
The maple leaves all developed big, round black spots. Some sort of fungus. And the damned disease reached my little balcony crops. My tomatoes developed black bottoms and rotted, so I gave up completely for a year or two.
Also, the soil in my flower boxes has started growing a type of moss. I keep scraping it off and throwing it down onto the lawn. I really need to dump all the soil and get new, quality top soil or whatever would be appropriate for these boxes. But without a car it becomes a more difficult affair and I’ve been putting it off.
My daughter had come to town to get a hip replacement and we had driven out to Costco to pick up a ton of stuff. There was a garden store across the parking lot and I picked up a big bag of soil. They had various types of soil but I said to myself, soil is soil, thus I simply picked up the cheapest.
Well, whoever packed it pulled the old trick of adding moisture to add weight. Millers are well aware of those tricks and carefully test grains or pulses for moisture when brought in by the farmers, docking them when moisture is above a prescribed level, because otherwise they’d be paying for water instead of grain. My poor dad never learned that when he ran the split pea mill for 40 years. In my first year at the mill, I befriended an old British grains merchant who taught me all the tricks.
My bag of soil had an odd mix of broken sticks and lumps, etc., but I kept saying, soil is soil, until I was proven wrong. I completely filled one of the flower boxes with this crap and nothing would grow in it. Water went right through it and out the bottom.
In a couple of the other boxes I simply topped up the existing soil and planted parsley and dill. Before I knew it, however, little tomato plants cropped up in all three of them.
I know there is some type of seed dispersal from birds but not tomato seeds. Now I’ve concluded that the crappy soil mix I had bought had tomato seeds in it, too. Some farmer must have just scraped off the top layer of a former tomato field and bagged everything that was left over after harvest.
The flower box filled with nothing but this new poor excuse for soil produced two or three tomato seedlings which never passed the two inch mark. In the boxes where I have only topped up existing soil, however, I now have four tomato plants, three of which have produced five tomatoes, and they look healthy and perky and happy – a total surprise.
Forrest Gump’s ma knew what she was talking about. Life is like a box of chocolates.