Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Day 88 / Day 24 - The long awaited update

Well, first the good news. Here are those itty bitty tomatoes all growed up.



And now the bad news. After all these weeks, these are the ONLY tomatoes growing on all three plants. The plants have gotten huge, but even after doing the "pollination", the pruning, and keeping the unit in a room at just the right temperature as the manual suggest, it looks increasingly obvious that only these three little guys are going to see the light of day.

Unfortunately, it seems like this is not uncommon. When I look at the reviews of the Tomato Aerogarden on Amazon, it looks like this happens quite a lot. So as thrilled as I've been with the herb Aerogardens, my tomato experience has been less than stellar.

Worse, when I checked yesterday morning, the plant with the three tomatoes had toppled over and was lying helplessly on the unit like that woman in the "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercial. The good news is, it doesn't look like the plant snapped, so I placed it back into the unit and tied it up with some Aerogarden Soft-Ties for plants (the manual says you can also use ribbon, velcro, or, ahem, old stockings...but I didn't happen to have any of those handy).

So the plan now is to hopefully salvage those three tomatoes and then try again.

On a much happier note, the lettuce is still growing like wildfire. Just a few days ago there was enough leaves to make a salad for a Barbie, but now there's enough for a family of Care Bears.

The herbs on the top shelf are doing okay too. It looks like one of the Sage pods is never going to grow, but ironically the other sage plant is doing phenomenally. Everything else has sprouted and the domes are off.

2 comments:

Lori Gaston said...

I highly recommend a certain forum... aerogardengrowers.com. There you will find much helpful info on growing nearly all of the current AG (AeroGarden) seed kits, plus "custom" seeds in the Master Gardener (1-Season or Deluxe) Kit. At the forum I recommended I discovered the "Be-the-Bee" way of pollinating...don't just shake the poor plant, use a finger, Q-tip, electric toothbrush, etc to polinate...much higher success rate, from tomatoes to peppers to cucumbers (starters)!

EddySam said...

Does your 2008 aerogarden still work??