Very few of you will know this, but Thomas Alva Edison - the inventor of such things as light bulbs and the gramophone - was a closet gardener!He deceived the general public into thinking that, in the following statements to the press, he was talking about inventing. In fact, it was all in code, as he was really explaining his experiences of life to the cognoscenti of the ‘Perfect Tomato Club’.
I have decoded his gardening work here for you, and have included a photo of his efforts to sterilize tomato seeds for storage: -
1) "To invent a new type of tomato frame, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
2) "The opportunity to grow the perfect tomato is missed by most people because it is dressed in grubby clothes and looks like work"
3) "Gardening is one-percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration"
4) "I haven't failed to grow the perfect tomato, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work"
5) "Good tomatoes are what happen when opportunity meets with planning"
6) "I never failed once. Growing the perfect tomato just happened to be a 2000-step process"
7) "I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun"
8) "Nearly every man who wants to develop the prefect tomato works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged."
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2 comments:
Is this a joke or what ??
OK, that old Tom (short for 'Tomato') Edison was a crusty old bloke who never ever gave up (witness his indefatigable efforts to create the light bulb), and he didn't mind calling a spade a shovel. All those quotes actually came from him but, of course, he let his landlady grow the tomatoes, as he was known to sleep on a cot under the stairs down at the lab.
I reckon tomato growers could learn a few things from Edison, about persistance for one thing. Hence the (tongue-in-cheek) gardener's version of his many real quotations, which came entirely from own fertile imagination. My apologies to his ghost...
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