Tomatoz for sal

About a day after our offer was accepted on the house, we put in an order with the Territorial Seed Company for 7 or 8 seed packets for garden crops.  One rainy saturday in March, Carmen and I planted a whole tray of tomatoes: cherries, early girls, Heinz slicers.  The germination rate was staggeringly high and we ran out of 1 qt. yogurt containers to transplant them in.  Solution?  Let's sell them!

After a couple months of pampering our little starts inside our kitchen (Seattle's frigid spring would have claimed an arctic rose this year) we set out to offload a couple dozen extra toms.

The timing couldn't have been any more perfect as Carmen had just set her sights on a Tinkerbell journal, which cost $8.  Selling her extra plants would present the best shot she'd have at raising the needed funds.  So on the day before Mother's Day, we set out for the Seahurst Post Office to see if we could chip away at that $8 goal of Carmen's.

We barely made it one block in our wagon when a neighbor bought 4 plants at 50 cents a piece.  At the post office we sold ~16 more plants in a span of 15 minutes.  The kids wanted to hit Lake Burien Park.  We sold 4 more in along the three block stroll to the park, four more at the park, and two more on the way home.  One hour after we left the house we arrived back home with about $15 (nearly enough for two Tinkerbell Journals) and one remaining tomato plant.

A few key observations... our neighbors are gardeners.  They asked good questions (are they hardened off?).  They also appreciated the idea of kids selling 50 cent tomato plants (cute doesn't hurt). And when we got down to the half dozen or so containers that had lost their labels, people didn't care.  They were content to buy the tomato and find out what it was later.  I think we found the right neighborhood.