I don't have elegant, well designed gardens other than in my head. But so far, my tomato garden is thriving. I wasn't sure they would because I planted them late. Wacky weather during normal planting season around here. But I love home grown tomatoes. And more specifically, I love
my home grown tomatoes. Yours are pretty tasty too but I didn't carry gallons of water out to nourish somebody else's home grown yummies when Hot Stuff up in the sky tried to bake them. Growing my own tomatoes.
contented sigh It nurtures me as I nuture them. I haven't yet started tomatoes from seed because I'm not that organized. My first priority every spring is readying the rabbits for summer. They all need clipping and all the hutches need cleaning. It's a race with the weather and my back. Will the one hold up while the other gets through it's schizophrenic season? Thoughts of tomatoes get lost in all that. And then Memorial Day suddenly smacks me in the face and I scramble to get veggies planted. I like to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, bell peppers both green and red, broccoli and parsley, and would love to grow some cantalope . Slugs get my cantalopes so until I do something about the slugs, it's fruitless - heh - to plant cantalopes. But that weather smack down in October 2011 set back all my gardening efforts and my veggie beds are over run with black raspberry bushes compliments of the birds, and compliments of hell, that nasty invasive Tree of Heaven is intent on taking over not just my yard but my whole town. I like the berries, just need to tame their wild side. So I made a new bed for tomatoes. Last year, I enjoyed a few yummy tomatoes but early blight and deer got most of them. This year with the seriously wet and cool spring, I considered not planting any. But apparently I am an optimist and when we had a run of pretty weather and I had a gift card to a local nursery, I took that bet that I can go up against Mother Nature and come out ahead. Do you hear her laughing? As soon as I got the tomatoes planted, we got rain. Wettest June on record, I believe. My tomatoes just kind of sat there and looked at me. "Ehhhhhh," they whined. "I don't like wet feet. I don't like the cold. And why'd you turn off the light?" Beginning of July saw blue skies and warm up and the tomatoes all yelled "I'm
hungry!" so I fed them bunny poop and they gobbled it up and demanded water which Mother Nature dumped on Virginia, West Virginia and Vermont
instead so I hauled gallons of water out to the tomatoes and they said "thank you." So now I have more than 2 dozen little green tomatoes and their little siblings still developing. Whether we get to harvest, my sweet tomato friends and I, remains to be seen.
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