Oh,Tomatoes and Other Garden Delights

Late lamented nectarine tree. Hope we get a volunteer or two from the seeds the squirrels bury. 
We miss the beautiful clouds of pink flowers and fragrant fruit, juicy ambrosia.

How very red, round and lovely. We love tomatoes for their flavor.

Some look like hearts (the organ) some brownish or purplish (Black Krim).

In the back garden on P St, since some of the nectarine orchard died back, sunlight has flooded into our sunken garden, making an ideal place for growing tomatoes. My mother and aunt start tomato seedlings in March.  Such a tender miracle to see the seedlings hatch out of their wee husks. We optimistically plant out the little things mid-May. Bury most of the stem to encourage strong roots. The transplants never look like much in the soil. So very tiny. Each set off with a ring of crushed white egg shells. We hope that they make gains between rainstorms and marauding bunnies.  If the current year is like the year before, soon the fill form a near impenetrable jungle. 

As they grow, we tie off the vines to long stick with bits of rag cloth.  My mother has a bundle of cloth strips labeled "best ribbons."  She washes them after each season, dries them in the sun and saves them for next time. She also washes the poles for disease prevention purposes.

My mother's chief garden joy is wall-to-wall tomatoes. I like a variety and can not say no to flowers and elements of intrigue.  Over the years, I added wild ginger and tiger lilies from a friend's mother, ferns and phlox from my mom, beloved hostas from many sources, a hydrangea from husband's work, lady statue that was a prop in a clothing store, trumpet vines that took 7 years to settle in and no time to run rampant. A curly willow branch from a dumpster-dived wedding arrangement is a 2-story tree.

My grounds keeping tends to embrace the jungle aspect. Joyous trumpet vine with a side of phlox in long narrow side garden.

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Flamingo Motel, Wisconsin roadside

One of my favorite parts of road trips is seeing iconic signs, logos, and gigantic bits of the past preserved like insect legs in amber chunks washed up on the banks of the Wisla/Vitula River generations ago. The unfavorite part of family travel was carsickness in our family car (a bumpy VW Beetle) and having to throw up in a roadside ditch.  Today, thankfully, I can keep the contents of my stomach intact by keeping my eyes on the horizon and avoiding reading (maps for instance).

 My parents' favorite gas station to stop in was Mobil with the fascinating, glorious Pegasus logo.
 https://www.google.com/search?q=mobile+gas+horse+logo&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=hrrcUb6QE4qo9gTenID4DQ&ved=0CEsQsAQ&biw=1105&bih=539
My mother recorded the price per gallon (usually something like 69 cents), the mile marker on the odometer, our location and destination.  This was in a series of tiny notebooks that fit in the plam of her hand. The other things she kept written notes on were recipes in a green tinted spiral notebook, her monthly cycle on a small funeral home (or was it insurance agency?) calendar, short to do lists or what was done lists on the back of envelopes.  She said she kept charts of what her babies ate, when they nursed, etc, but she gave that to a sister-in-law and never got those back.

I always got a thrill out of seeing the Sinclair Dinosaur. 

This was on the roadside someplace in Wisconsin last fall.

Same thrill and new pang of nostalgia. 

Some of the roads from my childhood no longer exist or have been superceded by larger roads,

so it was an unexpected pleasure to catch a glimpse of the familiar green brontosaurus. 

Not sure if this fictional brontosaurus has been reclassified as apatosaurus.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus

The next sighting of a mythical creature deserved a closer look. 

I have long been intrigued by flamingos, choosing a beautiful print to go over

the Universal stove in our former kitchen and found pink flamingos elsewhere.

http://storiesfromtheoldneighborhood.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-happy-place.html

Just the faintest hint of a corner is visible in the link.

 

I asked my dear husband to pull over to get a closer look.

Let's take a good look all around from every angle.

Aha.

Glorious and pink and massive.

                                                          I loved feeling so pleasantly tiny.

All the way around.

Adjacent pool/playground.

One last look.

 But before I sign off a few more flamingo pictures closer to home amidst trumpet vines
and peeking out from behind a chair. xoxoxo.

Back to the future, early tomato garden and flowers

Now as autumn rains fall, I'm looking back to the early summer days

with a mix of nostalgia and remembered exhaustion.

This photo represents some 6 or 7 hours of cutting down a huge stand of golden rod, then digging up their thickly matted roots, and getting painful, itchy dermatitis from poison oak or poison ivy. 

Good times.

 

My mom and brother put in stakes anticipating the growth to come over the hot, long summer to come. Hostas got burnt since the demise of the nectarine tree in the foreground.

 

I wish I wrote down the names of the heirloom varieties.

 

 

Phlox and trumpet vine.

 

Susan black eyes as my my mother calls them.

 

 

This nectarine bore a lot of fruit. 

Discovered by ants and squirrels alike.

 

 

Love my flamingos.

 

Love. Take good care. 

 Lemony wood sorrel underneath.

One of several edible "weeds" that are easily found in garden. 

The others were lamb quarters, garlic mustard, and purslane, not pictured.

 

"S" for so long!