While I’m about to tell you about my tomato plant, I must confess that this is a second test diary for me to learn how to position images and text. I’m grateful for the answers I received in the first exciting dull post from this weekend, and now I’m just trying the most basic advise provided there.
I am using photos from the image diary, posting to see how it looks so I can come back, look at it in different browsers, on different sized screens, and so on.
In the future I will use this for a more serious purpose.
Today, I’ll just tell you about the tomato plant I have grown on a hot, hot stoop in Los Angeles this summer, much to my delight and surprise.
I live in the “Valley” ecosystem of Los Angeles, so the heat this year has been brutal.
I have grown a tomato plant just outside my apartment door in a large pot with a cage to which its attached using similar ties as shown in the photo below.
It gets direct sunlight for about 10 hours a day, which can be taxing on these plants given the heat.
While it’s been exhibiting signs of heat stress, it’s producing a lot of tomatoes since the first few cropped up the first week of July. I picked four today, although some of them are “split” and I’ll have to use parts rather than the whole tomato.
(The earliest ones were exquisitely juicy and delicious and I ate them whole and mostly on the spot.)
One Out Of Twenty Ain’t Bad
The fact that this plant has survived out there on the hot, hot stoop is a lark in itself.
For every 20 seeds I attempt to grow, about 1-3 plants grow to seedling size, and most of those die in the hot sun long before producing any fruits or vegetables.
In five years of trying, I’ve produced one okra plant that gave me 3-5 okra a week for about 3 months two years ago, and now this tomato plant.
So that’s my track record on crops.
My Wallflowers Are Orange
I have grown some wonderful flowers from seed this year, too. Siberian Wallflowers.
The worst days of the early July heatwave almost killed them, but I’ve placed them in the shadows of of some other plants since then, and they’re thriving now.
Mine look somewhat like this and a lot different, too.
So, Yeah, and Thanks for All The Fish Advice
Thank you to the people who gave me answers, even obvious ones like “try centering.”
This test shows me that I can do what I want to do, as described in that post, and now that I see how easy it is, it all seems obvious. So laugh it up, people.
(And thank you to people who pointed me toward diaries that showed this.)
While I’m not going to immediately pursue the jpeg creation and photo manipulation instructions provided there, I appreciate that information, too, and may try to do some of that for some of the ideas I described this weekend.
And I’ll know how to embed tweets now, too.
So thank you. And thank you to the people whose photos I used here, which were in the image library, I hope you don’t mind, and let me know if you do.
I cannot take photographs right now, so I appreciate finding similar images.
(To briefly explain: I cannot take photographs right now without time-consuming complications related to hand tremors and visual impairment, combined with technology accessibility issues. THAT is one of the subjects I intend to address in the future, and use imagery/text paragraph/imagery format as I used here, but may need to make some more complicated image/text combo images. Right now, if you’re wondering why I don’t take my own pictures and post them here, that is the answer to that.)