You might think that gardening is a lot of hard work, and I won’t disagree with that but there can be so many pleasant surprises and unexpected results that it more than makes up for the work that we put in. Here’s one that I experienced recently:

I have grown cherry tomatoes from crushed up store bought tomatoes many a time, and usually got slightly elongated looking tomatoes as a result. This is because the store bought ones were probably a hybrid variety, and so would not give rise to the identical ones in the next generation.

For the first time, a tomato plant that came up on its own gave me these lovely round small cherry tomatoes:

A quick poll on my favourite Gardening FB group gave a resounding result of “It will turn yellow, not red!”. So I waited and waited and waited a little more, as is normal in the case of waiting for tomatoes to change colour J. A couple of days of gap in going to my terrace because of being busy, and today I found to my delight that they looked like this:

The yellow ones are also from a plant that came up on its own! And yes, the ripened red ones didn’t stick around too long as the taste had to be analyzed immediately.

Why I wanted to recount this here is to address a couple of points:

1. You don’t need to search for seeds when you first start with kitchen gardening. Experiment with what you have around you – methi and coriander seeds from your kitchen, or seedlings from crushed up tomatoes can give you great results.
2. There is something new happening everyday, and growing your own food can never get boring. Once you start experiencing harvests, you will definitely be bitten by the kitchen gardening bug for good.

Beginners as well as those who want to start growing more, do drop in at the event Oota from your Thota, on 25 August, which is also the International Kitchen Gardeners Day.