Rain - best for the Garden

Watering is a chore - takes a lot of time and we are lucky our water costs are fairly low - it's rural water and tastes pretty good too. So when it finally rains, ya just get a good break. We got just about 1.25 inches of rain - we had been watering so where the ground has some wetness to it, it actually helps absorb additional water.

When you have vegetables - especially tomatoes, watering consistently is essential. Tomatoes have this built in ability to grow very fast if they go thru a dry spell and get a lot of wet all at once. I know the yellow pear tomato is very susceptable to expanding and bursting itself causing ugly brown scars and open scars that can get buggy. When I put cherry tomatoes into 15 gallon pots which makes them a lot easier to pick, they get watered daily and as the temperature rises, they get sometimes double doses. This cooling spell also allows the tomatoes the opportunity to set bloom. Best if you don't go out and rustle thru tomatoes when they are wet - it tends to spark a flurry of biological disease agitation.

I told a grower I would experiment with some of his tomatoes - so far, I've not gone out to see if he even had any available. Part of me feels guilty - the other part says I was nuts to try.

There's a movie coming to the Circle Cinema - FRESH - you can find trailers to it on youtube. It will have some very graphic and disturbing video about how animals are treated in huge commercial farms. Look for it just before Father's Day on a Thursday evening - Justin Pickard obtained it for viewing.

Time to run the weedeater again - I am beginning to ask myself how dumb can I be to let parts of the yard get so weedy - this isn't just edging work - it's the 3 foot tall dock and horsetail and such. I bought a Poulan walk behind string mower - serious business - so far, it's been a great machine - use the heavy plastic twine - the lighter stuff is just a joke but the heavy stuff - works great.