I'm a Farmer!

When we got married and moved into the house near the farm, I said something to Lou about planting a garden the next spring. "I don't have any equipment small enough for a garden," he said. So I didn't. When we first moved here, the kids thought it would be fun to grow a garden, so they watered the heck out of an old, dry, packed down, 100% manure feedlot pen, and grew a decent crop of cucumbers. I am not really a gardener, per se. Hoeing and weeding and spraying don't fit into my calendar, even if I did enjoy doing them (which I don't, really), but I do like to have access to some fresh stuff once in a while.

So this year I tried a little experimental "garden." I planted two tomato plants in one of those inverted hanging planter deals, one cherry tomatoes, and one of the little pear-shaped yellow tomatoes. The trick with this sort of gardening is the watering, especially when one lives in the desert with little rainfall and it gets hot each day. And the water in the hanging pot sinks down to where the plant doesn't need it. So, except for when we've been out of town and Louis took over for a bit, I have diligently watered my little pot at least every other day, and the plants have grown and bloomed. The other day I picked my first two tomatoes, one of each color:
I then ate them both! Lou doesn't like raw tomatoes, and sort of laughed at me for trying this, so they are all mine.

Advantages of the hanging system are: no bugs or slugs to eat my produce, and no dirty marks where they touched the ground. Look how many more I will get to pick soon:
Hey, I'm a farmer!
:o)