Tomato Tragedy

Experiments are done in order to test hypotheses. That is to say, we want to see if something is true--for instance, "Tomatoes can grow upside-down from hanging buckets and be productive." We might then conduct an experiment. If the tomatoes grew productively, then we would say the experiment was a success. The hypothesis was proven true. If the tomatoes did not grow productively, we would also say the experiment was a success. But we would have discovered that the hypothesis was proven false. (Or at least under these conditions; it's hard to truly prove something false.)

Our upside-down tomato experiment is, in many ways, a true experiment. I was therefore prepared for the tomato plants to grow bushy and grand, but produce no tomatoes. If you've been reading this blog, you know that we have had tomatoes already turning orange. However, I was not prepared for a failure in another realm of the experiment: structural integrity.

This afternoon I walked out into the garden and found this:

The handle on one of the buckets had failed: pulled out of the plastic that attached it to the side of the bucket. That bucket fell, which loosed the counter-balancing weight from the opposite bucket. The effect of the second bucket pulling on the unbalanced spar tore the wooden arm apart. Since it was the lower arm, the arm running across it was also dislodged from the post, and down came the remaining two buckets.

Sad day.

What have we learned from this, class? Do not use cheap buckets to hang your tomatoes. Use the free ones that your friend gives you after she's used all the laundry detergent out of them. (Thanks, Margery. You rock.)

Until next year, when I can work out a more sound structure for hanging tomatoes all summer, the four we could salvage (one fell from another post earlier) have been set up thusly:


Now they're Sawhorse Tomatoes. We'll see how they recover from the shock of bungee-jumping without a rope.

It's all about constant improvement. Create, adjust, improve.

~ emrys