let's talk tomatoes

we all know that i love tomatoes! i love eating them. i love growing them. i love the way the plants smell. i love it all. last season i had quite a bit of success with my outdoor tomato plant, that is until the pests took over. so this year i thought i would try an indoor 'patio' plant. 

let me just say...i am not so thrilled. i have yet to taste the fruit of my labors.  i have two tomatoes on the plant that are almost ripe and ready to picked.  but these two little guys (and i mean mean little) have been growing for what feels like months now. last year i was picking tomatoes on the regular.  

these better be the best tomatoes i have every grown! why can't i just have beautiful raised beds like these?

(source)

some day. ah some day!

garden update

thanks to my best ma ma pal, i was just reminded that i haven't updated you guys on the garden in quite some time.

"ma ma weeks" just threw in the towel

after some crazy bug took over her squash.

oh "ma ma weeks", i am right there with you! i don't know how organic tomatoes are not $100 each. it is impossible to keep all the crazy tropical insects off them! i broke down early and bough some eco-chic spray, that didn't do anything! then i was over taken with assassin bugs. i was so scared of the little f'ers. they moved so fast and were aggressive and loved my tomato plant. after doing a bit of research turns out that they were actually helping me keep other bugs away, so i thank them for that, but i was so scared of them. mostly i was afraid the boy was going to get bit in the face, because that's how assassin bugs like to attack, and his face was always right up in my tomato plant. finally, one day i got brave and gangster. what i did to one of these guys looked like that scene from american history x. it was a great way to release some tension, but i might have gone a little over board to prove a point to the other assassin bugs that were watching. you know i was showing dominance over the garden.

none the less the tomato plant reached the end of it's harvest and died. over all it was a huge success. we ate about 20 tomatoes off the plant, so the $5 investment really paid off in the end. i learned some valuable gardening lessons and had some of the most delicious tomatoes ever.

it also gave me the confidence to try out some more gardening. i got into some peppers, pineapple, and strawberries as well. most recently i added some rosemary to my kitchen window sill.

growing what you eat has become something that will be apart of our family forever now. i realized how important it was to me that the boy know that strawberries come off a plant, and not out of a plastic container. i learned that i would rather use a little pesticide in my garden than deal with the preservatives that are covering the produce section at the store. most importantly i've learned a few things about myself:

i feel at peace when i am gardening.

i don't like wearing gloves

because i like to feel the dirt on my hands.

picking up worms with my bare hands

is worth it to see the excitement on the boys face.

someone stole my strawberry.

surprisingly enough, it wasn't the boy. he loves the garden and listens very well about not picking things until they are ready. but i am missing a strawberry...must have been a little birdie. i keep a close count on the fruits of our labor, and it is great to see the strawberries growing and ripening, but it has become increasingly obvious that i need more than one strawberry plant to feed this family. this one a day production isn't cutting it. we currently all take a small bite of our homegrown fruit and pass to the next watering mouth. they are the most delicious berries. on a side note i think that the tomato plant has reached the end of it's life cycle. tomato productions has come to a screeching halt and the plant seems to be self destructing.

10 things i couldn't live without this week:

sorry for being a day late here guys. this week was so full of travel and company, beach and family. it was a great week. hope you all enjoyed the week without words. it was a lot of fun for me, had so much fun taking all of these pictures.

1. road tripping with my boy across s.r. 80. growing up in fl, and having family spread out all over the state, i think that i have taken every back road from hear to the pan handle. i can now check s.r. 80 off my list. lots of fields, lots of singing with the boy with the windows down, lots of cows, and a whole lot of nothing. it's so amazing to me how so much of florida is still real land. i drove through a town called belle glade, and the city motto read "the richness is in her soil". i want to farm.

2. lot of long, slow walks on the beach in search for the perfect shell.

3. late night chats with my sisters. i am considerably older than all of my siblings. there is a 20 year age difference between my youngest sister and i. but they are finally getting to the age where i am the cool older sister, and not just someone that they really couldn't relate to.

4. celebrity. this is my all time favorite group game. and there is no box required. it's my families favorite night of vacation every time. we laugh, we all swear that my dad makes people up, it's full of stupid one liners and me saying "um" a lot.

5. greek tacos. i'll post the recipe soon.

6. surprise visit at the beach house from my family's best friends, the burgess's. betty burgess is my idol. her confidence, her humor, her effortless yet supremely chic sense of style....and on top of all of that this woman is one of the most caring people that i have had the pleasure of getting to know over the past few years. this woman has got it all. oh and did i mention that she is a designer? talk about dream homes!

7. the boy got to see almost all of his grandparents in one week. while on vacation at the beach we saw 3 sets of great grandparents, plus his patchie and lala (my dad and stepmom). then we got to meet nana (the hubs mom) for brunch on saturday. the only one missing was my mom.

8. matt and sandy came for a visit, finally. they are some of our closest friends from orlando and we have been missing them very much. it was so great to spend a couple days with them catching up and soaking up the sun.

9. eating the first pepper from the new plant, and some of my tomatoes on a turkey burger that was so loaded up with veggies that there was a complete upper bun blow out (yes, that's the technical term). they were some amazing burgers though.

10. getting to see the hubs after being gone all week. that was for sure the best thing that happened to me all week.

10 things i couldn't live without this week:

1. a very long, sleepy, pajama and movie filled monday.

2. sewing sewing and more sewing time.

3. my very first tankini

4. doing things as a mother that i swore i would never do (i.e. wear a tankini)

5. 2 pairs of pants for the price of one. took a pair of thrifted pants and turned them into a pair of shorts for me and a pair of pants for the little man.

6. $2 yard sale finds. i am getting good at making $2 stretch pretty far.

7. the most delicious tomatoes i've ever had.

8. new additions to the garden. we now have tomatoes, bell peppers, strawberries, and pineapple.

9. seeing my grandparents for dinner tonight.

10. sanibel island sunsets. arrived today for our week vacation with my parents and sisters. keep reading this week for "a week without words".

...and then there were 12.

so i have been feeling a sense of triumph lately with my plants. i have never had much of a green thumb, as a matter of fact i could kill about any plant you put in front of me. but at the end of my pregnancy we bought a tiny tiny aloe plant. it was about 3" tall. it was more of a cute joke than a serious gardening endeavor. but over the past two years, my has that thing grown. it's now about 2 feet tall and recently blossomed. (i am not going to lie, i didn't actually know that aloe blossomed until this happened.)

so with the internal gloat of this aloe success, paired with the other small success of not killing any other plants recently i decided it was about time to venture into edible gardening. deep down inside i would love to have this huge lush garden of fruits and veggies to fest on. so i bought a tomato plant. i decided on one that was already a full grown plant and had a few tomatoes on it, just to see if i could keep it alive. starting from a seed seemed a little too advanced just yet. so for the past few weeks i have meticulously cared for this plant. i didn't realize just how hard it was to keep a healthy tomato plant. there are so many factors that i didn't expect. but despite all the challenges i would say that i am doing pretty good. the plant started with three tomatoes, then i had 16. one morning i went out to check on the plant, and low and behold after counting and recounting and recounting again, there were only 15. my plant must have fallen prey to that damn possum that lives in our back yard. i grieved for a moment for the fallen tomato, but quickly recovered. and everything was looking great until yesterday.

after a beautiful afternoon of tending to my "garden" and playing outside with the family, we had a 3 tomato tragedy. and this time it was my own clumsy fault. that's right i accidentally broke 3 tomatoes right off the plant. i almost cried. i am keeping them in the kitchen window sill to see if they will ripen anymore so that they don't go to waste. if not i guess we will be having some fried green tomatoes soon.

but for now, we are down to 12.