My tomato committed suicide

[I discovered this post lying among the drafts--it had not been published several months ago when it was supposed to be. Here it is now. -Ed.]

This summer I made an attempt at growing a few vegetables on my back porch. I went to the store and bought a couple of tomato plants, some strawberries, and a variety of seeds. I bought some PVC pipe and fittings, and got some old laundry detergent buckets from Lisa's clinic with the intent of building an upside-down tomato garden. While probably nothing like the legendary hanging gardens of Babylon, it would have hopefully at least provided a few tomatoes worthy of fresh salsa.

Well, I never did build the hanger out of the pipe, but I did transplant the tomato seedlings into bigger pots with cages. My back patio/deck is on the east side of the building, so it only gets sun in the morning, plus it is covered from above by my upstairs neighbors' porch, so in order to give the plants the most sun possible, I placed them on the railing of the deck, which is actually quite wide and sturdy.

One of the tomato plants fell from the deck railing on to the floor of the deck early in its life. Its stem was torn, and I gave up on it. I left it on the floor of the deck and stopped watering it after a while. However, it must have taken whatever scant resources it had available and dedicated them to a single self-sacrificing act of reproduction, because, although the plant was gray and hunched over, it had one tiny, bright red tomato on the end of one of its branches. I did not want the plant's brief life to be completely in vain, so I harvested this tiny but tasty tomato and ate it on a sandwich.

The other plant I had much higher hopes for. I left it to grow on the railing, and grow it did. It produced many green tomatoes, but as they were at the point of beginning to ripen, the sun absconded behind that Washington gray for a few weeks.

Apparently this was too much for my plant to bear, for as I walked by the sliding glass door in my living room this morning, I noticed that something was different. I looked out the window, and the tomato plant was gone! As the skies grew gray and the days were shortened, the constant presence

I opened the door and ran outside (well, in as much running as one can do in the space of two steps) and the plant lay upside down in its crumpled cage on the muddy lawn below. I went down to the back of the building to retrieve it. I pulled it out of the mud, and peeled off the slugs which had found the one tomato which had ripened. The stem was seriously broken. I carried it up to my apartment and took it out to the back porch, where I straightened out the cage and stood the plant up again, but alas, the stem broke completely, and the prospect of homegrown tomatoes was completely lost until next spring.