After a SUPER busy baseball season/masters degree/mommie being sick and us living at the hospital or rehab/anything else you can imagine... we FINALLY got a free saturday to plant the garden!
We seriously lucked out this particular Saturday b/c I was thinking that the harbins community yard sale was taking place that morning and asked Jeff if we could all go and see if we could find some treasures. Unfortunately, I was confused and there was no yard sale. So i asked him to drive around just a little (and he groaned and moaned! ha!) and while we didnt find any good sales, we DID find some TOMATO PLANTS! That beats a good yard sale, anyways, I suppose!
The "Briar Patch" is about 1/2 a mile from our house and they have all kinds of plants and vegetation for sale pretty much year round. We decided this year to keep the garden small because of time restraints, the fact that we dont have as much room anymore (hello swing set!) and we still have 12 or so bags of frozen okra and 4-5 bags of frozen squash in the freezer from last year! So we decided to just go with tomato's and cucumbers. The Briar Patch had a GREAT selection of pretty mature tomato's and they were DIRT cheap. As in Home Depot sells smaller plants than these for about $4.50 a plant and we paid about $1.25 a plant!
Helpful Hint: When you plant tomatos that are this mature, you can plant them up to a foot deep (just over the first 1-2 little branches) and they establish quickly. You simply (gently) pinch off the stems that will be below ground and plant!
Rhyan, as always, was a big help!
We got several different kinds of tomato's this year. I specifically got some Rutgers plants for canning. They are considered an "old" tomato and have the most acid which makes for the best flavor!
And we got some Big Beefy Boys and some Better Boys. The Big Beefy Boys are known for not having such large water pockets and have more "meat"... in other words, they make better tomato sandwiches :-)
Good thing for Jeff that the garden is small this year... the tiller (um, circa 1960?!) is broken. Again. Shocker.
It was his grandads and we'll keep it and try to rehab it. Even if it cant be rehabed, we'll keep it for sentimental reasons, but i bet it would have made his life easier had it worked!
At first, i was disappointed that we didnt get the garden started until the very end of april, but then seeing as how we had such a severe nor'easter, we really were pretty lucky to have been too busy to get it done!!!
Heres to hoping for a successful harvest... we have used ALL of the canned tomato's from last year. So no more "from scratch" veggie soup or chili till we get some more! Crossing fingers! :-) Btw, I think that were my Daddy still here, he'd be pretty proud that we do even a small garden each year. And I'm super proud of my hubby for taking the initiative (ok, this year i may have had to stay on him, but in his defense, he's been swamped!) and being such a good gardner!
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