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What My Balcony Tomatoes Taught Me About Waiting
By Wren Iida · 6 min read
Three years ago I planted a single tomato seedling in a pot too small for it, on a balcony that gets exactly four hours of afternoon sun. I did not expect much. Tomatoes, I had read, want heat and space and confidence — none of which a fourth-floor apartment can offer.
What I got instead was a slower kind of lesson. The plant leaned hard toward the light, staked itself against a chopstick, and took eleven weeks to produce anything worth eating. Eleven weeks of checking each morning and finding nothing new. Eleven weeks of resisting the urge to feed it more, water it more, fix it into growing faster.
Nothing in the pot needed my urgency. It needed my attention, which is a different thing entirely — the kind you give without expecting a return on a particular day. By the time the first fruit blushed orange, I had mostly stopped counting.
I still don't have a garden, only a balcony and some patience I didn't know I was capable of. Some years the plant fruits early. This year, true to Small Heat, it's taking its time — and so, for once, am I.