Gardening!

[elfs]

Gardening

Tomatoes

Zucchini

Herb Garden

One of the things I do enjoy every year is the patient wait through July and into August for the garden to get going. Ripe tomatoes, fresh apples and pears, off-the-leaf basil and mint.

We planted Stupice tomatoes again this year. We did that two years ago and it worked fabulously. Stupice is a local heirloom variety that ripens early, with moderate-sized fruit that's amazingly sweet, so I'm very much looking forward to those. We also planted Cherry and Roma varieties. I'm not sure why Omaha likes the Romas; those are mostly used for making sauce, so while I'd love to have one fabulous truly home-made batch of sauce (with oregano, basil, and rosemary from the garden as well), I don't view Romas as worth all the effort. It doesn't have the ecstacy of a fresh tomato-basil-mozarella sun-warmed sandwich.

I also have one zucchini plant. I was warned not to plant more than one; one will produce enough zucchini to last through September, so we just planted one, and we'll see how that works out.

The herb garden refuses to die. Lemonbalm, oregano, sage, stevia, and even the rosemary bush we thought was doomed have survived three winters and is still going strong. The oregano has passed through its pollination period, but for the previous two weeks this smell of meat! hung in the air everywhere within ten feet of the herb garden.