If you read my blog of June 24, "A Golden Crop", you may recall my dilemma in wanting to find a way that I could still grow tomatoes even though I could no longer physically dig up my patch to plant them. It was during that time that I came upon an internet advertisement that said, among other things: "My neighbors laughed when I ordered ... now THEY ALL want a tomato garden like mine!" The Garden Patch(TM) GrowBox(TM). It's the perfect planter for you. Comes complete with fertilizer, easy instructions and planting guide. • Grows your plants better • Self-fertilizing • Self-watering • No weeding • No bending • Works anywhere • No gardening experience needed. • Poor soil, rocky, sandy … it doesn't matter anymore • Guaranteed to work every time.
Now doesn't that sound great? How could I miss with such a deal? So I took the next step and "invested". In my previous blog I explained about all the costs and work that resulted from that decision. But I looked forward to having great tomatoes - big, red and tasty. And how could I go wrong when this season even actually turned out to be an exceptional season for growing tomatoes. All of our friends have the best crop ever.
But we have had the opposite experience. First, we found that we had to lug water to these containers every two or three days to keep these large reservoirs filled. I guess, as advertised, they were self-watering as long as we kept the reservoirs filled and that physically was a worse job than just digging the garden. We did find that the plants grew and grew and soon began to produce little tomatoes. But as each one began to grow, it developed a hard scale or it began to rot and that made it uneatable.
I've already picked and thrown about 30 of them away. Those that are left to ripen are showing the same signs. How many have we picked that we could eat? To date, exactly zero. How many do we expect to get? I've been forced to drastically lower my expectations - Exactly zero. We have no idea what has gone wrong, but it is a very major and costly disappointment. And I believe that I have followed all the instructions completely. They were placed in a good location, I used good potting soil, we've kept them watered and the varieties planted were all well know ones that we have grown successfully before.
Now they say that the results are guaranteed to work - EVERY TIME. So I wrote to Garden Patch about our results. They quickly replied with two offers. The first was to help us diagnose what had gone wrong. I sent them the picture shown in this blog for their review. To date, they have not replied or provided any diagnosis. The second offer from them was that if I sent the containers back they would refund my purchase price. However, the shipping cases are long gone. Why would I have saved them? And the expense of packing and shipping them back was not part of their offer. So maybe these marvelous containers will just end up in our weekly trash.
We did buy a separate patio tomato plant which was not part of this experiment. Unlike the others, it has produced several tomatoes for us, without any problem. However, they are rather small and haven't gone very far. So we will be visiting the local roadside stands in the coming weeks to get our nice ripe tomatoes. We should have planned on that from the start.
So, I guess the moral of the story is not to trust everything you see advertised on the internet. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You are also never too old to learn a new lesson, especially an expensive one. And, there are no shortcuts to growing a good tasty tomatoes.
P.S. - The company finally responded and claimed the problem was blossom end rot. I really don't believe that was the problem because the marks and rotting were not at the opposite end of the stem. And I had sprayed for that as they suggested.
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