Adventures in Shade Gardening, Part 1

I toyed with titling this post, and potential series of posts, Adventures in Shade Vegetable Gardening. However, that is much too clunky and not nearly as romantic or exciting. In fact, it sounds downright pitiful, hopeless, and semi-delusional. The reason for that is that anyone who knows vegetable gardening knows that shade and vegetables don't mix.

The view from the sliding glass door in our apartment, over the patio. Living on a lake might seem romantic, but in this case it really isn't very much so.

Our apartment faces north, and is angled slightly toward the east. Right now our patio gets about 3 hours of afternoon sun. Here's our sad little container "garden" as it is right now.

Most of the containers are herbs, which will do okay, even in shade. The strawberry pot has thyme, one pot has basil, others have chives, parsley, cutting celery, oregano, etc. The two long tan pots are planted to lettuce mix and mesclun mix. The greens should also do fine in the shade, especially as the weather gets hot this summer. Steven's two sad spider plants have also been relegated to the patio, on the theory that they will get more sun and more water out there than in here. Maybe they will even look healthy by the time fall comes and they need to come in!

At this point you would be justified in wondering why I consider our attempt at shade vegetable gardening semi-delusional. That would be because of this:
Yes, those are tomato plants. The tall one is 'Chocolate Cherry,' and the short one is 'First Light.' Chocolate cherry is a brown/purple indeterminate vine cherry tomato. 'First Light' is a very new variety of red slicing tomato (also indeterminate) that is supposed to have excellent flavor. The recommendation is to harvest it when the bottom half of the fruit is red and the shoulders are still green. The two plants are in a 13 gallon pot, which is technically large enough to hold both of them. I'll probably prune them to keep them under control, but we'll see. The real challenge is the sunlight issue. Tomatoes need 6-8 hours of full sun. Presently we get maybe 3. I'm hopeful that by mid-June the sun will be far enough north in the sky that our poor patio will perhaps get 5-6 hours of sun. If not...well....we'll have really beautiful plants with no tomatoes!