The is the first year since I moved back to West Virginia that I am staying home all summer. I usually spend a month in Colorado with my kids, but Covid and Mr. FixIt’s health put a damper on that. So, the commitment to grow a garden took hold in the spring and…here we are. I gathered a handful of peppers off the three pepper plants yesterday. Peppers aren’t my favorite thing, but I wanted to put some banana pepper rings in my zucchini pickles this year to give them a little zing and there were several plants marked down at the greenhouse. Something happened to the labels, so it was anybody’s guess what kind of peppers I would end up with. It’s fun to take a chance once in a while, right?
The zucchini and yellow squash are really getting big so I’m definitely going to pick them today and get those pickles in the jars before I run out of luck and one of my nocturnal visitors decides they’re hungry. The Passion Flowers are blooming as they climb up the old chain link fence.
When I saw this meme the other day, I laughed. It’s so true. Growing anything is empowering. I remember all the times I had a garden in Colorado and how hard it was to grow much of anything. But, tomatoes? Lands…you could grow a tomato in the worst little square foot of soil and get at least enough to satisfy some of your cravings. I tilled and dug, planted and weeded, and watered those tomato plants and I was lucky if they came up to my waist. We have tomato plants out here in this garden that are taller than me…by a good foot and a half! The Romas are really putting on fruit fast now. They will be great for canning stewed tomatoes. The Big Boys and Better Boys are doing very well. There are some that are as big as baseballs now. There are some other varieties out there, but Mr. FixIt never saves the labels so other than the Romas, I don’t know what the others are.
It has been so terribly hot here…and sticky with humidity. Once it hits 10:30 or so in the morning, it’s really difficult to do much of anything. I’m still having to water 2-3 times a day to keep the garden from frying. Thank goodness we had a couple of rain showers pass through last evening. We dropped over twenty degrees in a matter of an hour or two. Now it will be even more humid today, but we have to take the rain when we can get it. We do have some little pumpkins setting on. I’m looking forward to harvesting some “Wedding Pumpkins”. These are grown from seed salvaged from the pumpkins that decorated our wedding nearly two years ago.
Our ground is getting cracks in it. West Virginia soil has a lot of clay in it and when it dries out, it contracts leaving great cracks and fissures. I remember one year I came home in the summer to visit and there had been a really long hot and dry spell. The ground out at the farm had cracks in it that were 2-3 inches across. It’s not that bad here…yet. Maybe this little bit of rain we got will bring some of the grass back. We haven’t mowed in over two weeks here at the Ponderosa.
I hope you had a good weekend and that you are staying safe and healthy.
❤️
“The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops.”
2 Timothy 2:6 NIV