Jon and Amber

Or, “How obsessed can Amber be with her crashing tomato buckets?”

My tomato buckets got through the thunderstorms of Saturday night just fine. Even the one with the goofy duct-tape band-aid looked pretty good on Sunday morning, so I was feeling pretty good about my fix, but by Sunday afternoon and evening it was starting to look wilted again. I decided to just leave it there until it either recovered or else completely withered away and was 100% dead. I didn’t feel optimistic, but I wasn’t going to give up!

Much to my surprise, it survived the night and actually looked a little more perky this morning than it did at the end of yesterday! It’s not nearly as droopy and wilted, and the leaves have some more vigor to them again. I have mixed feelings about this, because now I realize (or at least strongly believe) that I could have patched the other plant that I thought was “dead” after the initial fall. And I’ve also learned that even if I couldn’t have patched the injury, I could have cut it off completely and put it in a jar of water until it had re-grown a healthy enough root system to be planted again. Oh well… I guess these are all lessons learned, to be used in future summers.

Also, and most importantly, next summer I will NOT wait until so late into the month of June to order tomato seedlings! Next year, I will start some seeds indoors when it is still cooler outside in the spring, so I can get some actual tomatoes much earlier in the summer.

Just a little update on the tragedy of the falling tomatoes.

I had watered the plants on Friday morning, and discovered them on the ground this morning, so I suspect they fell during some rainstorms that hit while I was at work on Friday, which means they probably spent many lonely hours crashed on the ground. If I had managed to find them sooner, I may have been able to do some patching.

Since these BeefSteak hybrids are a determinate variety of tomatoes, I don’t have high hopes for the mostly-dead plant which was only left with one tiny little branch. If they were indeterminate, I would be more optimistic, but I just don’t know what to expect right now.

As for the tougher of the two fall victims, it suffered a second fall before this evening was over. Jon was attaching some strong ropes to the buckets in order to re-hang them, and accidentally knocked them off their temporary perches. This fall was much more damaging to the plant I was hoping would be making a strong recovery; it sustained some very ugly breakage at the base of the stem. (I was too shocked/sad to take a picture of the injury, but it was very bad.) However, I did get a picture of the bandage that I fashioned out of duct tape:

And of course, not long after I finished the patching, the thunderstorms and tornado warnings started rolling through our area. Jon moved the whole rig up against the southeast wall of the garage for me, but I won’t know how they’ve fared the storms until tomorrow morning. The suspense is terrible!

Next year, I am planing at least twice as many tomatoes. This kind of drama is just ridiculous!

Regarding the storms – Jon, Jeremy, and I are all fine; we did rush to the basement a couple times when the tornado sirens went off, but nothing really happened, and Jon even spent most of the storm outside soaking up the rain and enjoying the excitement of the whole thing. Can’t say I necessarily condone that kind of activity, but I guess I’m glad a house didn’t fall on him!

Where are the other 2 tomato buckets?

All that’s left of them is some dirt on the deck…

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Last week, on Thursday, when I picked up Jeremy from daycare, there was a representative from a local chiropractic office there talking about doing screenings on the kids. I though they were doing a quick scoliosis check or something, to see if the kids may need to come in for adjustments or anything. Jon had scoliosis as a kid, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to have Jeremy checked. She didn’t actually really examine him very closely, but she said that I could pay $25 (a promotional rate) to make an appointment to come into their office on Monday for Jeremy to get an exam. My red flags went up just a teeny bit when she looked at the medical history form I filled out and said that they could help with Jeremy’s chronic ear infections, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to go in and get an exam either way. The $25 was just to get you through the door, but I guess they assume they’ve got you at that point, because then you have to make another appointment for getting adjustments.

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Testing WP app for iPhone. (Jon is driving, not me!)

I forgot to post about our 4th of July weekend! Unfortunately, we didn’t remember to take pictures of much, but I did get these on the evening of Friday the 2nd when Jeremy got to ride the little cars at the local carnival in downtown Forest Lake. He was absolutely thrilled and called out “BEEP BEEP” and “WHEEEE!” the whole time!

He also got to play a fishing game with a little magnetic fishing rod, and he caught 3 magnetic fish from the little pond, and got to pick out a prize (he picked a green stuffed fish). I think he would have rather stayed there “fishing” all evening though.

On Saturday morning, we all went downtown again for the annual 4th of July parade, held on the 3rd so it didn’t interfere with church services on the 4th. Forest Lake has the biggest Independence Day Parade in the county, and it was scheduled to be about 2 hours long! We got there about 20 minutes before it started at 10am, and decided to leave about halfway through since the temperature was creeping into the 90s. Jeremy loved seeing and hearing all the horses, fire engines, tractors, and MUSIC! He danced to the bagpipes and marched in place when the marching bands came through. He didn’t pick up any candy that was being thrown, but he did get a police-badge sticker and TWO freeze-pops in that one hour. Not too shabby!

We got home a bit before noon, had a light lunch, and then all 3 of us took a big long nap. On hot days like that, it’s very nice to have air-conditioning in the house! After our naps, one of my friends from Fargo called to say that she and her boyfriend were in the cities, and we decided to meet up with them down at the Como Zoo, which is a very nice little zoo, especially for being free! We saw giraffes, lions, tigers, and polar bears (oh my!) and had a nice time. To leave the zoo, you have to walk through Como Town, a little child-sized amusement park, and of course Jeremy made a bee-line for the little car ride that he had seen on the way in – the one we told him we could see when we left the zoo. He remembered exactly where he had seen it and ran as fast as he could to get there, and then proceeded to pitch a big crying fit while waiting for Jon to go purchase some tickets for him to take a ride. He cheered up as soon as they let him through the gate, and rode the cars twice before we had to go. Another crying fit ensued, but he cheered up pretty quickly as we left.

We went out for dinner at TGI Friday’s and had a nice time, and then Simone and Dan went on to do some more touristy things in Minneapolis while we went home to put Jeremy to bed. He’d had a big exhausting fun day and fell asleep really fast! Simone and Dan came back to our house later, since I’d offered to let them stay in our guest room, and we had fun chatting, watching movies, and just doing some nice catching up.

On Sunday afternoon, Jon, Jeremy and I went to Jon’s parents’ house for a nice BBQ with their family, Jon’s grandma, and his uncle, aunt, and 2 cousins. After dinner we did a few small fireworks in the backyard. They were nothing huge, just a few pretty little fountains and such, but the first one had some pretty loud BANGs that startled Jeremy a little bit. After that, we did quieter ones and he ended up being pretty interested in watching them. He even had his own ideas about what kind of show we should put on for him – he kept saying, “Ahhhh….. a GREEN one next!” He was also impressed watching Jon’s younger cousins dancing in the yard with sparklers. They created a lot of smoke which kind of obscured everything, and Jeremy exclaimed, “Whoa, lady hiding in the smoke!” Too cute! (The cousins are pre-teens, but to Jeremy they are “ladies” – I guess they are the Big Kids in the family now!)

Sorry for the lack of pictures, we were just too busy enjoying ourselves and having fun to remember to take any last weekend! I hope everyone reading this had a safe, happy, and FUN 4th of July too!

I’m trying an experiment this year. I know you can grow determinate tomatoes like the BushSteak Hybrid pretty well in containers, and I know you can grow tomatoes upside-down, so I’m trying some upside-down BushSteak tomatoes on the deck this summer! You can’t see the plants very well in my picture due to all the background greenery, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that Jon built me this beautiful cedar stand to hang my tomato buckets from, and I just love the heck out of it!

I’ll try to get some better pictures of the plants soon, maybe this evening. They’re nothing much to look at but I’m happy that they’re growing at all. Last year my grandma gave me a little tomato seedling which I put into a bucket, and it got kind of long and gangly and then died of neglect. This year I am actually trying to make an effort and I’m hoping it pays off at some point with at least a few tomatoes this summer. I just hope I didn’t plant them too late. I received the seedlings from Burpee a few weeks ago, but Jon didn’t get time to build the stand for about 2 weeks after that (it just took him 2 days), so they got a bit of a slow start. I guess that’s why I’m considering this whole project more of an experiment than anything… Wish me luck!