House trained and everything

This past week Jared surprised me by getting some tomato plants and potting them. We had planned to try out this upside-down tomato plant thing that we saw in Sky Mall or something, but with the move we didn't really have a place to put tomatoes. The idea is that you first place a bucket or pot on a stand several feet off the ground (this is the apparatus you can buy at Sky Mall - a specially designed pot and stand).

There is a hole in the bottom of the bucket, and you place the tomato upside down so it pokes out of the hole with the roots and soil still in the bucket, then pack soil around the roots. The idea is that as the plant grows out of the bottom of the bucket, it will be inclined to wrap up and around the bucket toward the light. When it puts on tomatoes, they will never touch the ground since the combination of the distance from the bucket to the ground and the large plant mass tending to grow upward will keep the tomatoes suspended in the air, where they will not rot as fast or be as prone to insect infestation.

Jared modified this arrangement by taking hanging pots, drilling holes in them, and suspending the plants upside down in those. Hopefully the pots are big enough to provide enough soil in the long run, but I think they will be. The tomatoes are already growing like crazy, and right away showed a tendency to wrap back up around the pot and up into the air, toward the light. I will start taking some pictures and posting them on Flickr for a sort of time-lapse effect.

We were at my parents' house for Easter dinner last night and my mom asked if we were worried about the plants freezing. Good grief -- hadn't even thought about it. Last year I planted my tomatoes back in March in California and I was eating tomatoes by June. Here it can frost as late as early May. So we took the tomatoes inside last night, just to be on the safe side. We hung them on the rod in our kitchen closet overnight, where they hopefully stayed toasty warm. Then we trotted them out first thing this morning for some fresh air. So now they are indoor tomatoes, I suppose. We sure are babying them.

Edited to add: OK, a picture is worth a 1,000 words, so check out the pictures at the Sky Mall site here and here.