Homegrown Tomatoes

Remember my teeny tiny little tomato bud? It grew and grew as Mike and I watched, watered and pampered it. Well, truth be told, Mike did most of the watering. It’s been thrilling to watch as the little buds grew from one stage to another.

Photos by dellgirl

By mid-July there were several tomatoes and some were turning red. WOW, what a treat, RED tomatoes! Those babies looked about ready to make a nice salad.

We decided to give them a few more days to ripen and made plans about when to pick them and eat them. Now all we had to do was decide whether we’d make salad or put them on a nice homemade subway sandwich.

Several days later we “ceremoniously” picked our tomatoes, brought them inside, and washed them with grandiose “pomp and circumstance” and a lot of TLC. Well actually, Mike washed while I, the drama queen, ran for the camera like a kid with a shiny new toy on her brother's birthday.

Look at those babies, aren't they gorgeous!? Homegrown tomatoes that we planted from seeds, watered, watched and pampered all through this record Texas drought.

This is good, life is good…it doesn’t get much better than this. Next, the BIG FEAST!

Just call me “The Farmer in the Dell”.

Garden Rewards

It's so hot here air conditioners feel like heaters and, it's all dry air. The only thing that helps is to be still and stay out of the sun. I do that very well.

Baby son is working hard to keep our garden from turning to ashes. There is one bright light in the midst of all the gardening agony though.

We have a tomato growing! Look just below and to the left of the yellow flower, see that cute little thing?

Now there are more baby tomatoes showing their faces. I have to get pictures of that soon, this photo was taken a couple of weeks ago.

We're as excited as a couple of kids on Christmas morning around here, waiting!

My Mother's Day Gift, A Garden

Before: This area in front of the porch was a sad pitiful necglected unkept flowerbed. Needed a lot of care. I could see possibilities but the thought of all that hard work made me tired just thinking about it. Had me sweating and aching and I hadn't even lifted a finger to do anything.

If you think this looks a mess, you should see what looked like before.

I spend a lot of time sitting on the porch enjoying nice weather, morning coffee, mid-day cold drinks and so on.

Out of the blue, Baby Son decided to clear it out and make me a new flowerbed. Said he thought I'd enjoy working in it while I'm outside. I sure would enjoy that! How did he know?

Here's what it looked like after he cleared out the dead shrubs, dry leaves, pine needles, and other junk.

I like it, I like it!

We hopped in the car and raced over to Home Depot garden center to look at plants. I could hardly wait start digging in the dirt and planting pretty flowers all over the place. We took turns deciding what plants to get. Here's what we came up with.

Oh wow, I can't belive my eyes, what a beauty!
There's still much to do but, for now I enjoy sitting on my porch more than ever now.

Thanks, Mike.