Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and other tales of intrigue… October 22, 2008

OK, I don’t know the best way to do this, individual posts for each story, or one long post…. I guess we’ll see what unfolds. That’s just what I get for not doing them promptly! First, tomatoes; ours were INSANE this year! I kid you not, we had tomatoes ALL OVER our garden. I didn’t even fertilize them and we still had 6 foot vines on them, seriously reaching from one end of the garden to the other, growing in the corn, cucumbers, cilantro, the other corn, zucchini, just everywhere. I tried to get a pic so you could see the vastness of the tomato leaf jungle, but it doesn’t do it justice. Here’s the lowdown though, I picked a whole bunch of tomatoes about 2 weeks ago, on a Tuesday or Wednesday I think; picking everything that was remotely close to wanting to be ripe. (Here’s a question for you I’ve been trying to figure out all summer: Do the tomatoes start out white, then go green before orange/red? Or vice-versa?) Reds, oranges, and orange shades of green. I went back out on Friday and picked about half the vines that were left, literally the vines. I just pulled up the whole plant and picked it clean. We were going out of town and it was supposed to freeze that weekend anyway. So, here’s what I pulled out of the garden that day- the bowl and pans were what I got the first day, and everything else I got that Friday. Needless to say we have a lot of tomatoes, and could have had a bunch more…life is just too crazy. Next year though, I’m only doing one roma or cherry or grape, and the rest will be LARGE tomatoes, for easier salsa making. This year I have a bunch and it’s a bit of a pain, although picking them is a bit like picking grapes, whole bunches at once.
You know Sam’s in kindergarten, and loving it, but I had to show off for him a bit. He’s really loving reading, he’s been bringing home little ‘predecodable’ books from school that teach him sight words, but he’s been reading some from the library, like the Bob books, and he’s really taking off! In fact he was reading scriptures the other night; funny thing though, one of his last books from school was questions, he started reading it to me, and I said “is that how you’d ask a question?” Well, he started over, and up went the voice, and up when the shoulder, and over went the head, it was pretty cute/funny! when I figure out how to get the video on here I will.

Oh, and I’ve finally got a picture of the wall quilt that Tom did this summer- This is a Tom original, and while he did decide against using broken glass, You can see the barbed wire running through it and making the handle. The title is “Escape from Paradise” which makes Tom wonder what message we’re sending our kids, hanging it over the front door….