An experiment

Almost any gardener has one favorite vegetable in the garden, one that, if everything else in that garden failed except for that one, it would still worth having a garden.  For me and Cliff, it is tomatoes.  

Ever since 1980, I've had some amount of blight on my tomatoes; it is primarily caused by fungal or bacterial pathogens.  I shouldn't complain, because we always have enough tomatoes to eat until frost anyhow.  I have tried all kinds of tricks hoping to find something that works:  putting straw around the plants to keep them off the dirt, or always putting tomato plants in a different place than where they were in the two previous years.  I've sprayed that stinking old copper spray on them and pulled half the black leaves off the plants in hopes that would stop the death march of my plants, but alas and alack, nothing works very well.   

This year I'm trying something different.  It appears that many of the old trusted breeds have had a facelift.  I have Celebrity Plus, Jet Star Plus, Early Bird Hybrid, and Better Boy Hybrid.  Also Big Daddy, Bodacious Hybrid and Mountain Magic (that's a cherry tomato plant).  Those last two were started with seeds I planted in the garden; the others I bought as plants.  I have made a map of all my tomatoes, with their names written down so I don't forget what's in each space.  

I've learned a few things about tomato plants already, and it wasn't necessarily about blight.  For instance, if some nighttime creature eats every leaf on a baby plant, leaving only the lonesome stem of the plant sticking out of the ground, if you don't bother it, more leaves will come. 

These three plants will be the first ones to give us tomatoes to eat.  The two on the right are Celebrity Plus, and the one on the left is called Super Fantastic.

And these will be one of the last ones to give us tomatoes:

They won't likely have anything to harvest until sometime in August.  No matter; at least I'll know which ones fit in best next year.

We had creamed new potatoes and peas from the garden yesterday, and I have beets ready to eat.  We had several rounds of spinach before it started to bolt.  I've started preparing the new strawberry patch and already got rid of the patch we ate from this year.

My boysenberries are coming on strong, and I may have enough for a pie this week, if I can manage to stop eating every ripe one I see while I'm in the garden.  Boysenberries taste a lot like raspberries, although you won't find them in the grocery store because they are too soft to travel.

So there you have it.  I wouldn't know what to do with myself if it weren't for my garden.

Here's three and a half hours I'll never get back

I have noticed for a while that I "talk" better when I'm writing (or typing) than I actually talk out loud.  Obviously, when I'm writing the words, I have lots of time to get things right,with nobody watching or hearing.  When I blog, I have the internet to find the right word and then change things accordingly.  Just above, I tried several way to spell "obviously" and never got close to getting it right.  After trying three or four times, I used autocorrect to get it right.  Even then, I couldn't think what the word autocorrect was, so I asked Google this question:  "Why does my cell phone sometimes change a word?"

I could go on, but you get the picture.  If I want to have a conversation with someone, I can't say, "Just a minute, I'll get my computer."  

Last week Cliff helped me put new strings on my guitar.  I got them all tuned up and started to sing "Bobby McGee" and couldn't even remember the first line.  It is my favorite song to sing, and relatives know it's "my song".  It's one of the few songs I could sing without lyrics nearby.  When my grandaughter Monica was four years old or so, she was going somewhere with her dad; he had his radio on and Janis Joplin came on singing Bobby McGee; Monica said to her dad, "Why is that woman singing Grandma's song?"

I couldn't believe I've forgotten that song I'd sang so often.  I did google the lyrics and tried to sing it, but even then I made a mess of it.

So this morning I got a thought:  Maybe if I start writing the words, one line will lead to another?  Thank goodness I did manage to remember the first line.  And sure enough, I eventually got all of it without looking it up.  A couple of times I couldn't remember a word or line, so I'd leave space for it and go to the next line, which I remembered.  Sure enough, I got every word of it without looking up the lyrics.  

To make it harder, I was writing those words with my left hand.  Some of you may remember during the Covid years I learned to write with my left hand (barely).  I mostly abandoned the idea, and you're lucky if you can read it because it's the worst penmanship you will ever see, but here it is.

  And then, without reading the lyrics at all, I sang the whole song.