The Story of the Tomato Giant
It’s spring and you know what that means. It’s time for the Tomato Giant queries.
I couldn’t help but notice all the traffic I’ve been getting from folks searching for information on the Tomato Giant giant tomato trees. Last year I bought the actual “As Seen On TV” Tomato Giant giant tomato trees that are also advertised in the coupon section of your Sunday paper. Let me save you the trouble of wondering if it works by telling you our experience with the product.
Let me first say that neither my husband nor I have much experience gardening, so we went into this Tomato Giant project with an existing handicap. What ultimately happened to the tomato plants was the result of our inexperience and a wicked wind storm, so I can’t actually say whether or not our sprouts would have resulted in giant tomato trees.
We purchased our Tomato Giant giant tomato trees in March of last year. We bought what we thought were six trees; three early trees that would supposedly produce tomatoes by July 4th and three “stupendous” producers that would yield enough tomatoes to keep me in homemade pasta sauce and salsa throughout the winter. Our total order was more than $20.
A few weeks after we placed our order, we received a notice from the company that our shipment would be delayed. I can’t remember the reason for the delay (something weather-related, I think), but our tomato trees did not arrive until May. And they weren’t trees. They were seeds.
You can read all about our reaction here, but basically we paid $20 for two packets of tomato seeds, six tiny growing containers and a brick of dehydrated plant starter. It seemed very late in the season to start growing tomatoes from seeds, especially since we could have spent the same amount of money on some decent size tomato plants from one of the local nurseries. But we gave it our best, which turned out to be sub-par in the gardening world, and our tiny tomato sprouts perished before they ever got a chance to get going.
Now my goal here isn’t to warn you against buying the Tomato Giant giant tomato trees or to suggest the company is pulling a bait and switch by delivering something that is not at all what they advertise. The weather conditions last year may very well have prohibited them from sending actual trees. I don’t know, but had I known I would be getting seeds and not trees, I would not have bought the product. End of story.
So please, before you fork over any money for these “As Seen On TV” tomatoes, try to contact the company and ask if they’ll be delivering seeds or plants this year. You may be able to find a similar product at a local store for a fraction of what you’d pay them. I did and bought an entire salsa garden to boot.
We’ll see how it turns out.
-Heather
March 25, 2009
