Tomatoes everywhere

Ok so if you like tomatoes, come to sewing night at my house tonight… I have a ton. When we came home from utah we had so many ripe tomatoes, we don’t know what to do with them all. So come get some, if you would like. Otherwise I will be making salsa tomorrow.

I have double this amount so don’t be shy. And just to let you know they are mostly all early girl tomatoes. Which means they’re all pretty small. They aren’t real meaty, they are more fleshy and really sweet. But I think they’re better than the ones in the stores, so come take some.

Super fun weekend

Well I started out the weekend with a trip to the beach with the girls on friday, which was super fun.  Especially because it was the first time I left my house for anything but doctor or pharmacy visits in about a week.  Me and Carmen have finally gotten over our sickness.  Thank heaven. It was a rough week, but we are alive, and one good thing came out of it…Carmen learned she could just lay down anywhere and take a little rest.  She would never sleep anywhere but her darkened bedroom, with the fan on, before that.

Here are some cute pictures of the beach:

Here’s Carmen looking…beachy.

Here is the lady octopuss I made for the kids to distroy.

Then when I got home from the beach I went out to water the garden and found this:

Our first red tomato!  It was just a tiny one off of the early girl tomato plant, but I was excited none the less.  This picture made me laugh because this describes a day in the life with Carmen perfectly.  And guess who got ahold of it and took the very first bite…of course she did.  But I still got to eat the rest of it and it was sweet and delicious.  Much better than the ones you can buy in the grocery store that get picked while they’re still green and ripen on a shelf.  We found a few more red ones today and ate those with dinner.  It’s only a matter of time before we have tomatoes coming out of our ears.

Now back to the weekend, Later friday night we went and saw spider man 3 with emo-spider man, which was good (not great) and extremely long.  Then we went and ate at Chilies and scared a few members of the staff with our husband’s late night antics.

Saturday we went back to the beach, which was just a little more tiring than fun.  Carmen was all up in everyones business which makes it hard to relax.  Then we headed over to the san diego county fair.  It was a lot of fun seeing all the farm animals and stuff, but I think it will be more fun next year when Carmen is a little older and can ride some of the rides.  We still had a great time stuffing ourselves with all the great fair food, and Lee had fun playing the carnival games trying to win us a cupie doll.  We didn’t actually win anything, but that’s ok, it’s all about the ambiance. I didn’t get any pictures of the fair because I forgot my camera again, but all in all, it was a fun weekend.

Yellow squash

This marks the first vegetable out of our garden. Yay!
We’ll eat it tonight to see if it’s good.

Crafty

Here is the super cute bib that I finished sewing today. Lauren gave me the fabric and the pattern (so pretty much the whole thing) I just sewed it up. Thanks again Lauren, I love it!

And since I am a tomater nerd… Here is another picture of my green tomatoes. (and Wendy if you want any of these when they turn red, you’d sure better start being nice to me) :)

I don’t know what is so fascinating to me about seeing my garden grow…But it is just so cool to plant something tiny and watch it turn into something you can actually eat. It blows my mind.

P.S. Two more days until go time.

I don’t know if I really want Thursday to actually come though because then I have to go through Jim withdrawals until next season.

First Tomato

Here is the first tomato to pop up in our garden. The garden is coming along nicely.

Here it is now and here it was when we started just to refresh your memory. I finally figured out my watering problem ( I had the gardener unhook the sprinklers in that area) That way the tomatoes don’t get watered every day, I can just water them with the hose once a week like they need. If you water tomatoes much more than once a week it leeches all the iron out of the soil and makes them yellow, and it can also make the tomatoes have soggy rotten bottoms. They do the best with deep water, then no water for a while.

A few more tomato tips:

• If you put egg shells at the bottom of the hole before you plant the tomatoes it adds calcium and other nutrients.
• Tomatoes are members of the nightshade family, so never eat any other part  of the plant…  only the fruit is non-toxic.
• Marigolds planted around the garden help keep bugs away.

Garden

Yay, we finally finished planting our garden. And Carmen’s stepping stone looks cute at the foot of it.

20 tomato plants, 2 yellow squash, and some marigolds to keep the bugs away.

It’s kinda fun planting a garden, it makes you feel so grown up to me… for some reason. I don’t know, something about learning to be self sufficient.

The whole time I had the dixie chick’s song Cowboy Take Me Away stuck in my head…” I wanna grow something wild and unruly”.

Anyway we’ll see how it all turns out. Hopefully around the end of the summer we will have a ton of plump red tomatoes to eat. I am so excited.