Late this morning, I decided to spend a little time attending the bounty of ripe tomatoes, and the herbs in our backyard. I have to give my husband a lot of kudos, because he is the one with the green thumb who planted all of this in spring. He's the one who tended to the tomatoes by feeding them, and managing the tomato cages-- and pinching the suckers off. Thanks, Sweetie!
Here are the tomato plants in late March...
Here they are in late summer!
Craig and I mutually agree that we need to stick to container gardening. We have too many ground squirrels and gophers, who (the first year we lived here) massacred the garden Craig created on top of our hill-- including a drip irrigation system.
The earth is too clay-ish and would take a lot of work and money to try growing vegetables on top of the hill again. At one time, Craig managed to have 200 heirloom tomatoes, that were growing beautifully. Those darn rodents chewed up and destroyed most of our tomato crop. We were so frustrated, and we tried everything we could think of-- to no avail.
These two little scaredy cats (littermates Camo and Tiger Lilly) are in their prime years (12 years old) and have quit being useful hunters of rodents. They just watch me from the safety of the back door, and are pampered and spoiled rotten by us.
I picked a lot of tomatoes, and I made something that I'll blog about later in the week.
Craig has lovingly fed and nurtured our two container lemon trees-- one is a Eureka and the other is a Meyer Lemon Tree. That !#$#$ Meyer lemon tree has not coughed up one ripe lemon in three years!
Ha! there are a LOT of blossoms and small green Meyer lemons. Could this be the year of bounty? Please? I love Meyer lemons!
It won't be long until these orange bell peppers are ready for something tasty!
Do you see my lovely chives? These have done so well for me this year (and I take credit for watering these, faithfully). I had to pull out a lot of dried chives I fell behind in trimming. I use chives in so many recipes...
I love baked potatoes with butter, sour cream (in moderation, of course) and fresh chives. Yummy!
See my garden cart (actually this used to be my horse's manure cart when my horse lived nearby and I had stall cleaning duty) full of dried curly parsley, dead cilantro and old chives? It kind of felt like giving the chive plants a haircut-- and it does look a whole lot better!Well, folks... later this afternoon, my husband grabbed my camera and I saw him photographing the garden cart full of what I had trimmed away.
I just uploaded my photos to edit and look what he photographed!
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! A black widow spider!
There's that unmistakable hour glass. While deaths from black widows are very rare, I hear they can cause a very nasty bite. Either way, I don't want to test either theory!Look again, at the photo I took of my garden cart! See it in the left corner? How did I miss that?!I'm not afraid of mice and most spiders. But I would have definitely squealed in fear and run away fast!
I think I feel safer with a chef's knife and a hot stove than I do digging around where these critters dwell.
My husband-- my hero.
It's back to work tomorrow, so I'll blog when I can. I didn't bake this weekend. Let's just say that my tomato project turned out to be a lot more labor intensive than I banked on.
Wishing all of you a great week,
Little Miss Muffet, who is not sitting on her tuffet
aka:
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