Complete circle - the upside down tomato

[Kobus Jooste]

Funny how, when you least expect it, your aquaponic system can show you that you are sometimes not completely responsible for all that grows in it.  End of last year I took out some tired looking cherry tomatoes from a bed and replanted.  I must have dropped some fruit into the bed because just as the current batch of plants started looking good, a whole lot of tomato seedlings popped up in a single position.  I took out all but one, just to see if it can find its way in the tangle of plants already established.  It has now become the upside down cherry tomato of the greenhouse.  Growing sideways to get to the light its crow became top-heavy and it flopped over the side of the grow bed.  Now I have an upside down tomato with the best of both worlds – roots in a grow bed full of nutrients and no competition for light from any other plant.

 

I’m smiling too because I’m scoring a couple dozen sweet cherry tomatoes that I did not work for.  Now that is a bit of full circle aquaponics – self seeding beds.  Imagine that.  Huge systems in which some plants are left to go to seed and sprout in-house in a natural pattern.  We are decades away from such magnificent systems, but wouldn’t that just be such a pleasure to have.  A wild aquaponic garden is obviously not a very likely outcome of the technology that we are working on but sometimes it is fun just to imagine the far-out possibilities.

 

Until then I’ll just let my upside down tomato grow as well as it wants to and reap the rewards of having done noting to cause it to be there in the first place.

[David Hart]

I know you'll get a big smile every time you eat a tomato off of that plant Kobus :-)

[TCLynx]

don't ya just love happy accidents