Book Board Chat

Jim That's the cool part!....My yard is flush with the deepest black glorious loam I've ever seen. I grew up in Kentucky, where all the reddish clay soil looks like dog poop and barley tolerates plain old grass. Here?, hurl a half eaten bagel out the back door, and next year you've got a field of poppies. It really helps to compensate for the naturally occurring laziness I seem to have been born with.

5-6 years ago I got shipped four tiny sticks from the Burpee catalog of 100% pure strain Concord grapes (a bonus given free because I bought other seeds). Sort of like those "approvals" they used to send young stamp collectors in the mail circa 1950's. So I planted them, forgot about it....aaaaand there are now beautiful purple bunch filled tendrils, stretching across the low branches of the swamp maples up to THREE yards over. Four plants are now 642+. My direct next door neighbor commented over brats and beers, that he's worried because his young kids keep munching them like candy. I told him to relax. "I can attest that those are a 100% catalog certified pure strain of Concord grapes. He paused for a moment looking at me.... and burst out laughing.

I suspect a similar scenario is responsible for all that kudzu across the deep south.........

As for the tomatoes, I'm stunned too. We ended up with 15 plants as wide as your outstretched arms....and equal in height to me (i'm 6'1"). Roughly 50 tomatoes on each. We don't even possess enough Ball jars for all this! Even Mrs Briguy has run out of tomato based casseroles to try.

The year before I harvested six tomatoes....as in exactly SIX individual tomatoes....LOL!! Everything else in our garden seemed to curl up and died off meekly. Except for the beets and the Zucchini....i ended up with like 150 zucchini. Don't ask me how many times I've eaten tomato stuffed zucchini surprise this summer.

Functional question How is it you're able to post from a cruise ship? Some sort of magical ocean wi-fi? Elon Musk Star Link? Just wondering.

Lynne Oh, such attitude is common around here. Apparently something in our water leads to great tomatoes as well as deep personal entitlement. Earlier this year a flood took out a bridge everyone uses to commute over. The replacement cost was estimated at over eight million dollars. The local paper was soon filled with dozens of letters to the editor demanding that WE shouldn't have to pay for that, because that's why we have a GOVERNMENT. I wanted to hunt down those writers, grab them by the neck, and chant "E Pluribus Unum" three times.