In The Beginning....

I don't have a green thumb. I can keep cats alive for a long time, but plants? Not so much. If plants could follow me around, screaming at me to feed them, maybe - just maybe - they'd have half a chance.

Instead, I have a Burnt Umber thumb. (A what? you may ask. It's my favorite Crayola Crayon color name. And it's a shade of brown. A Brown Thumb. That's what I have. But doesn't Burnt Umber sound so much...classier?)

If you are looking for a how-to-garden blog, this isn't it. This is more of a "don't do what I do" blog - or a "learn from my mistakes" blog.

I saw somewhere on Facebook (or someplace online) where some cheapskate (and I'm all about cheap!) put the root end of celery into water and it grew more celery. Get celery without buying (or stealing!) it? I'm there...

It got this far before the stalk got soft and flopped over. I will try it again (with a new root end) and put it into soil sooner. I can do this. I can.

So yesterday, I had some Campari tomatoes that were getting a little wrinkled. They still looked okay otherwise, and I didn't want to throw them away. I cut them into quarters to fry them with garlic and herbs in olive oil for a quick and simple pasta sauce. The first three tomatoes looked all right on the inside. The fourth? There were these little white things I thought were worms. Ick! I tossed the tomato away. The next tomato had the same thing. I looked more closely - was that green on the end of the white thing? Omigosh - the tomatoes were sprouting inside the tomatoes!

A quick check on Google told me that this isn't all that unusual, especially with tomatoes that have been left, forgotten, on a counter. So my next experiment will be to see if I can grow my own crop of Campari tomatoes.

I cut the remaining three tomatoes in half and put them into an empty egg carton (I love that I can recycle the egg carton!).

And now I wait....