This year, I was determined. I was going to direct sow seeds into the garden beds in my back yard and grow something. I watered them every day and was rewarded, after an inordinately long time, with tiny little sprouty things.  I planted nasturtiums, lemon balm, and lemon grass.  I received nasturtiums and tomatoes.

Pretty amazing, right?  Almost magic.  After some head scratching and wondering if the seed company had somehow got it hilariously wrong I realized something.  Besides the lemon balm and lemon grass seeds that didn’t sprout, I had unwittingly sown tomato seeds into the bed fresh from the compost heap I raided to amend the dirt.

I have fuzzy memories of watching a Martha Stewart episode, or some such, that talked about how to harvest tomato seeds for your own garden and it involved rotting the gelatinous protective shell of the seeds before they could be planted.  Well, in a compost heap this happens naturally right?  Now, I’m just as lazy a composter as I am a gardener, so I’m probably not doing something right, like creating an environment where a lot of heat is generated.  I just throw fruit and vegetable waste on the heap and cover it with the leaves and grass clippings that are also  on the heap.  Nature does the rest.  So now, I am half expecting random tomatoes in every amended bed.  It adds some randomness.