I’ll probably post those pictures tomorrow.  It’s getting late on this end America.  Stay tuned.

A lot has gone on in the past couple of months that I haven’t shared.  Call it laziness, call it boredom, call it writer’s block…but why don’t we just call it laziness and end it there.  Today I finally uploaded pictures to the computer that I will post.  I think I’m going to make 10 different slide shows, like chapters of a book so you and I don’t get lost or confused.  I’m going to start with a slight retraction.  Paul approached me, and wanted me to say nicer words about his squash efforts, so here they are:  They didn’t all die, but they aren’t doing so swell either.  Moving on.  What’s that?  What are we up too?  That’s a great question, you, out there in cyberspace.  Paul is a busy man, he’s doing all of the heavy lifting and pruning work.  He’s out there in the yard everyday staking tomatoes, tying the loose ends up, and retying them.  He told me that he has to re-tie them a lot because they grow and move.   This was a huge revelation for me.  That seems logical.  Our tomatoes are doing good.  Our peppers are doing amazing.  The basil seems to be enjoying life on the farm and our potatoes are there.  I still don’t know what to do with them, like when to dig them up.  It’s really day by day.  We went to the farmer’s market here in town on Saturday.  Some farmers had tomatoes out.  My mind jumps to ‘hmmmm, when did they start their plants?  When did their plants go into the ground?’  It was cool to just check out every one else’s product, then start strutting in my mind like ‘What you got?’.  Speaking of the Fayetteville Farmer’s Market, we were walking around and Paul says “Oh it’s our neighbor.”  There is this Italian man down the road named John Paul and he has a blueberry patch.  Needless to say but I will any way, ‘Johnny’ was selling blueberries.  So we stopped to talk shop with him for a minute to re-introduce ourselves.  Johnny was pissed that he lost 150 lbs. of potatoes due to all of the rain we’ve received this year.  That’s just the weight of the seed potatoes he put in.  The Fayetteville area has received 40″ of rainfall this year, when the average rainfall is half that.  All of this extra rain has caused a lot of area farmers to have trouble with some of their crops.  We hear it all the time, whether we start chatting up an old-timer at the store, or talk to our neighbors.  Everyone seems to be having most trouble with their tomatoes.  Paul and I haven’t noticed any trouble with ours.  We have raised beds, so they have pretty good drainage.  I’ve been really busy mowing our yard.  Everyday.  Every DAY!  There’s so much of it.  I mow it and then it rains five or six inches.  The next day it’s eighty-three and humid and my yard grows three inches.  I’m fighting a losing battle, but it’s experiences like this that make it all worth it in some weird, hard work, no break, sore muscle sort of way.  There’s so much work that I have to do on my rows that I can’t get to because I’m always mowing.  After not selling anything for a clip, we did manage to sell almost eight pounds of basil to the Greenhouse Grille.  That was a week and a half ago, and it’s in need of a manicure now.  There’s some valuable knowledge for you if you don’t already know.  Basil LOVES to be trimmed.  I didn’t know that.  Last summer, I would trim it leaf by leaf when I needed some.  I was constantly popping off the seed pods, and the plant just got tall and stemmy.  Now that I give it a good trim, it’s bushy and leafier.  I pulled out all of my garlic, and I reaped three or four pounds of it.  I was so shocked that I grew garlic.  For some reason I thought it would be a lot more difficult.  It’s just that we’ve bought it for so long, that I never imagined growing it.  You just plant it in the fall, and dig it back up in the summer.  Who knew?  Now you do.  Grow some garlic.