How My Garden Grows...

Since this most recent scare about tomatoes and salmonella, I've been feeling pretty pleased that I'd planted 3 different plants back on Mother's Day. Then I went into two of our grocery stores. Not a tomato to be found that wasn't on the vine or a grape or cherry tomato. Now frankly those are the ones I like, but things were definitely looking a little spooky in the stores...
And so I decided to run by Lowes and see if they had more plants - they did. They're not nearly as far along as the ones I've had settled in since the second weekend in May...
They've got several good-sized fruit on each of the patio tomatoes and the yellow pears are just beginning to fruit...

I decided that 2 more Big Boy tomatoes were not a bad way to spend some of my food dollars right now.

Lettuces aren't doing much - the weather got too hot too fast, so they're struggling. I couldn't find "Summer Lettuces" in seed packs, so I think I'll have to forgo that this year.

So the next thought is this: I may need to can some of these tomatoes (Okay, I should be so lucky to have an abundance of produce from potted tomatoes!). Still, I think I'm going to join in on Freecycle again and hope for a good canner and jars.

I found a lovely receipe for rice and dahl today (I adore good Indian food!), and so my next shopping list is getting longer. While I don't believe in hoarding food, I'm thinking it might be smart to buy a few things when they're on sale that I can store elsewhere than in the pantry.

And I joined a challenge in the simple living group on Ravelry to remove 100 items from my house by the end of the month - lots of gals have had a head-start on me. I'm not the fastest at this, either. I'm NOT including the bags I make for people or the fabrics I have to bring in to make those bags.

But I can certainly stand to move some of this clutter out to a better home.

So...Food and Clutter-busting seem to be my projects in June! It really is time to do something about it all! I also re-evaluated the decision to take the bus right now. If my commute were longer, it would make sense. But at this point, gas has to get a lot more expensive for me to justify the higher cost of the bus tickets - at $3 per day round trip for tickets for a trip that is only 7 miles round trip? You can do the math as well as I can. It's still cheaper to drive.

Now I'm going to try dropping a bit of "pixie dust" over the two new tomato plants - they've got a little catching up to do...!