So truth time... I didn't really get into gardening until I moved to Sydney about half a decade ago. Everything before that had been half hearted at best and didn't last long. I moved into my inner West apartment and happily bought my food from the supermarket like every other mindless automaton until a couple of things happened in close succession. I bought several packets of herbs which all went off before I could use any of them (about $45 straight into the bin, such terrible wastage, which was completely contrary to my upbringing), and I had a dream about the tomatoes that my father grows in his garden that I used to eat when I was younger. Not those hard and rubbery, tasteless watery pouches that are coloured an unnatural red, that supermarkets attempt to pass off as tomatoes. No. Not those.
I was eating one from a bucket just after it had been picked, it was still warm from the sun and had the finest layer of dust from the top soil that had blown around in the wind a few days before. I didn't clean it, I didn't wait for it to cool, because I knew what waited for me. I knew the riotous explosion of flavour, the brightness of colour, the sweet tang of juice. I knew the pure and unadulterated happiness and memory that would poor into my mouth as soon as I bit into that curious not-vegetable-but-in-fact-a-fruit. I woke up in the middle of the first bite with a metallic tang in my mouth that precedes the rapid production of saliva when your mouth waters. I wanted that tomato more than coffee when I woke up. If you know anything about me, you will realise that only an act of God could make something like that happen. So I took it as divine direction that I should do something about it.
So, on the first day, my balcony garden was born. And I looked upon it and saw that it was good.
