This year's Tomato harvest
Dear bro,
Okay, the blog title today is a bit of a mis-leading one. Allow me to explain...
On an annual basis Melody and I go digging in portion of the yard in the spring to set up our vegetable garden. This is just something that home owners with an average amount of land in their back yard have an urge to do yearly once the last snow has fallen and the overnight temperatures consistently bottom out in the 40-45 degree range.
So starting in early May we "de-weed" a small section of the yard that we had previously tilled up a few years before. This proves to be tedious as we agreed not to use chemicals in our garden and we pull all the weeds by hand. Once completed, we head off to the local Lowe's home improvement store for some fine plant specimens that had their start somewhere in south Florida, were unceremoniously yanked from the ground by someone who probably was not even paid minimum wage because of their lack of English vocabulary, put in a temporary warehouse with millions of other starter plants destined for gardening saps like myself, and then trucked directly to every major city north of the Mason-Dixie line that is close to having the last frost of the year and an over abundance of black thumbed suburanites who's closest brush with farming is when they get stuck behind a tractor on a rural road after taking a wrong turn off the highway.
We go early to Lowes, about 7:30am on a Saturday morning. For good reason, as by 9:00 am the place is a seething mass of humanity creating queues at the registers. After perusing the assortment of juvenile veggie plants on display, we pick up several varieties of tomatoes (yellow boy, big boy, roma, and celebrity to be exact) , a few pepper plants , and a squash plant. With that annual spring glee splashed across our faces, we happily forked over our hard earned cash (well, okay... we used our Lowes card..) to take home this fall's potential bounty.
Several hours later we have the little green suckers firmly packed with top soil and in the ground, in a 10ft x 6ft patch on the right hand side of our backyard, complete with a small two foot fence to keep nature at bay. Or so we thought.....
A couple of months pass as the garden turns into a behemoth of green, requiring us to place cages to keep them from falling over each other. Several large green tomatoes had formed and it was looking like a few months of salsa, spaghetti, and salad fixings.
Then the horror struck. I noticed on afternoon in late June. I had expected to be able to pick the first crop of the season in a day or two, but when I went to perform the nightly watering, I noticed a lack of tomatos on the vines of the plants. Upon further review, I also noticed on some of the plants not just a lack of tomatoes that were clearly visable the day previous, but also a lack of limbs that yesterday's tomatoes were adorning. There was only one obvious answer... some critter had a Lowes card for my yard......
Two days passed before my first suspects emerged. I was sitting in my office upstairs when I looked out my window to see...
Ahh... a family of racoons. This could be my culprits, however for the last couple of years my small two foot fence had done the trick in keeping them at bay. Plus, they always seemed more interested in the birdfeeder hanging from the tree in the picture above then they ever had in the veggie patch.
Less then two days later I spotted a more likely suspect....
Now this critter could definitely reach over my fence and do some damage to the tomato buffet I had kindly layed out for her. However, it did seem like an awful lot of tomatoes for a single dear to eat. Unless it was really greedy? Or....
Maybe it had two kid bandits along with it.....
Needless to say that we did not harvest very many tomatoes this season, but the local critter population seemed to be very grateful for our efforts.
Okay, the blog title today is a bit of a mis-leading one. Allow me to explain...
On an annual basis Melody and I go digging in portion of the yard in the spring to set up our vegetable garden. This is just something that home owners with an average amount of land in their back yard have an urge to do yearly once the last snow has fallen and the overnight temperatures consistently bottom out in the 40-45 degree range.
So starting in early May we "de-weed" a small section of the yard that we had previously tilled up a few years before. This proves to be tedious as we agreed not to use chemicals in our garden and we pull all the weeds by hand. Once completed, we head off to the local Lowe's home improvement store for some fine plant specimens that had their start somewhere in south Florida, were unceremoniously yanked from the ground by someone who probably was not even paid minimum wage because of their lack of English vocabulary, put in a temporary warehouse with millions of other starter plants destined for gardening saps like myself, and then trucked directly to every major city north of the Mason-Dixie line that is close to having the last frost of the year and an over abundance of black thumbed suburanites who's closest brush with farming is when they get stuck behind a tractor on a rural road after taking a wrong turn off the highway.
We go early to Lowes, about 7:30am on a Saturday morning. For good reason, as by 9:00 am the place is a seething mass of humanity creating queues at the registers. After perusing the assortment of juvenile veggie plants on display, we pick up several varieties of tomatoes (yellow boy, big boy, roma, and celebrity to be exact) , a few pepper plants , and a squash plant. With that annual spring glee splashed across our faces, we happily forked over our hard earned cash (well, okay... we used our Lowes card..) to take home this fall's potential bounty.
Several hours later we have the little green suckers firmly packed with top soil and in the ground, in a 10ft x 6ft patch on the right hand side of our backyard, complete with a small two foot fence to keep nature at bay. Or so we thought.....
A couple of months pass as the garden turns into a behemoth of green, requiring us to place cages to keep them from falling over each other. Several large green tomatoes had formed and it was looking like a few months of salsa, spaghetti, and salad fixings.
Then the horror struck. I noticed on afternoon in late June. I had expected to be able to pick the first crop of the season in a day or two, but when I went to perform the nightly watering, I noticed a lack of tomatos on the vines of the plants. Upon further review, I also noticed on some of the plants not just a lack of tomatoes that were clearly visable the day previous, but also a lack of limbs that yesterday's tomatoes were adorning. There was only one obvious answer... some critter had a Lowes card for my yard......
Two days passed before my first suspects emerged. I was sitting in my office upstairs when I looked out my window to see...
Ahh... a family of racoons. This could be my culprits, however for the last couple of years my small two foot fence had done the trick in keeping them at bay. Plus, they always seemed more interested in the birdfeeder hanging from the tree in the picture above then they ever had in the veggie patch.
Less then two days later I spotted a more likely suspect....
Now this critter could definitely reach over my fence and do some damage to the tomato buffet I had kindly layed out for her. However, it did seem like an awful lot of tomatoes for a single dear to eat. Unless it was really greedy? Or....
Maybe it had two kid bandits along with it.....
Needless to say that we did not harvest very many tomatoes this season, but the local critter population seemed to be very grateful for our efforts.
posted by Rich in Cincy | 3:50 PM
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