Compost Tomatoes

My volunteer compost tomatoes- germinated midsummer, planted in only 3 inches of dirt, and they won't quit.

See that tiny speck of yellow? Those are the last few tomatoes on the dying tomato plant that never took off quite right this year.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to share this, but I am a beginning gardener and this stuff is still really exciting to me. I hope it always will be this much fun. 

Everyone makes compost sound so simple, but of course they're lying. It's not as simple as all that- it's like baking bread the old fashioned way. If you've done it before, you get it, and it's easy. If you've never done it, it isn't quite so easy. You need brown carbon rich materials like dried leaves, green materials which are nitrogen rich, oxygen, and moisture- but not enough to drown it. My first compost pile was a putrid mess. I can't remember whose advice I acted on, but the stench was unbelievable. That was not a win. Probably a lot of green material, and nothing else, not even air. 

When I moved to this house, I started composting as soon as I could. One year later, with high hopes, I dug around and found not beautiful compost, but the dusty dried remains of a thousand meals. It was an incredible archaeological find, but nothing I could put in a raised bed. So I started watering it as often as I watered my garden, and a few months later the miracle I had been waiting for finally occurred. Beautiful compost, and lots of it. 

My garden had already been planted, so I opted to just shovel it around some naked patches in the garden where the chickens had scratched all the soil right out of the beds. The effect was immediate- my strawberry plants looked undeniably healthy. But the surprise was tomato plants which popped up ALL OVER. I had already spent so much time trying to baby tomato seedlings into life and health that I didn't have the heart to just tear them out. So I began the ridiculous process of planting and transplanting them as they grew. 

But here it is, November as I type this, and where the Juan Flamme tomatoes that I painstakingly sowed last spring barely survived, my compost tomatoes are still going strong. 

These plants sprouted out of compost. There was a whole gaggle of them in two square inches. I spread them out to get bigger before I had space in the garden to transplant them.