Let’s talk more about seeds.Besides loving them into fruition, we need to talk about diversity. A friend was having some luck with a very prolific ‘cherry tomato’ he was growing in a container on his lanai. He brought us a few to try out. They were shaped more oblong then round and about the size of a large grape [pretty much like a standard cherry tomato]. They were very evenly colored, that fabulous color that can only be described as well, tomato red. The skins were not too thick or too thin and they tasted sweet and didn’t have you looking for the salt. All in all, we decided to save the seeds and see if we could have some success growing them, or something new.
You have to understand that growing tomatoes in Kauai can be challenging, because, we have what I call Mr. Sting Fly. He likes to come round and lay eggs in your fruit, of all kinds, which basically ruins it. This is a legacy left to us from commercial fruit growers of the past. Mono cropping and mega chemical fertilizers combined with black plastic, …. well, don’t get me started.
Anyway, this lovely little guy had seemed to elude Mr. Sting Fly, another reason we wanted to try it.
We saved the seeds from two small ‘de kine’ (that’s Hawaiian for ‘the best’) and let them dry out (not in full sun, that doesn’t work) and later, I planted them with lots of hope, in just two 4” pots on the lanai and gave them lots of love.
Yep, you guessed it; they all came roaring up like a small group of survivors ready to go.
When they were about 4” tall I carefully separated them and planted them along the fence in the Magic Garden. I pinched out those pesky side shoots until they reached the top of the 4’ fence, then I gave up because these guys definitely had a mind of their own. But, by then I didn’t care because they were ‘going off’ as we say here. All of them were flowering (see last blog picture), and fruiting in the most amazing ways. Yes, way, ways.
On each plant the fruit was shaped differently than the little tomatoes from which we grew them. Some were fat and round, with those little tomato grooves about the size of a plum. Some were elongated by 3’’with little tips or tails at the end. Some were just perfectly smooth oblong beauties. And, they all were born on ‘vines’ (in tomato-talk that means a tomato is coming off a single stem that runs down the center for each flower). And, these vines were holding 12 to 14 of these beautiful wonders for each vine and they were already starting to turn red. I can’t wait to see what comes from their seeds.
