The Fruits Of Her Labor

Terry has put a lot of work into her garden, both the plants on the ground and in her raised Vego planting beds, and she is starting to see some of the fruits of her labor. While we were working out in the garden yesterday, we spotted quite a few little green tomatoes.

What? You didn’t know that tomatoes are a fruit? Well, they are. In botanical terms, a fruit is a ripened flower ovary that contains seeds. This includes such plants as plums, zucchinis, melons, and yes, tomatoes. It’s exciting to see things coming up.

In yesterday’s blog, I told you that I still had a small stretch on the slope between the barn road and Terry’s garden left to mow. I decided that instead of using the tractor and the bush hog, I would just use the Husqvarna riding lawn mower, and it did a good job of it. I’m probably just a wuss, but the last couple of passes on the steepest part were not comfortable for me. It kept feeling like the lawnmower wanted to tip over.

I think in the future I will leave that job to either Terry or our son Travis. Not because of the steep slope as much as the fact that coming down or going up it really makes me bounce up and down, and by the time I finished yesterday, my back was hurting so bad I could hardly move. The things we do to tear up our bodies when we are youngsters come back to bite us in the butt when we get older.

Besides that little bit of mowing that I had to finish up on, we also set up Terry’s third planting bed. As with the others, the first step was lining the bottom with cardboard to keep grass from growing up through it, then we took the Mule out on the perimeter roads and gathered up some pretty thick limbs to go on top of the cardboard. We followed that up with another bed-load of smaller branches and twigs on top of that, and a third load of dead leaves.

When that was done we added several bags of Black Kow compost, and several more bags of garden soil on top of it. Then Terry created several holes in the soil and planted 26 strawberry plants, since the ones we planted in the garden itself did not sprout. I do love my strawberries!

A lot of grass was growing up along the edges of the raised planter beds, so Terry used her Worx cordless shear and shrub trimmer to clean those up. This little device is very cool – it has both a 4-inch and an 8 inch blade for all kinds of jobs. Here are before and after pictures on one of the planter beds.

While she was doing that, I set up our two Orbit tripod style sprinklers to water down the backyard. But for some reason one of them seems to be clogged and wouldn’t let more than a trickle of water through. Someone online suggested using my air compressor to see if I could clean it out, so I may give that a try.

We knocked off about 7:30, both of us pretty tired, and I told Terry that instead of cooking we should just run into Gordo and grab sandwiches at Subway. She didn’t put up a fight about that because she didn’t have a lot of oomph left in her.

Back home, we watched a couple of hours of television and then it was time to write the blog and call it a day. According to the weatherman, every day this week is going to be hotter, so I’m glad we got as much accomplished as we could, while we could.

 And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. My newspaperman’s nose tells me there had to be a story behind this.

Thought For The Day – Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.