Joe's Place

In the previous post, we were all set with our lovely new raised garden. All that was left was for the good Lord to shine His warm sun down and bring the gentle rain to nourish our babies and help them to grow. Heirloom tomatoes and green bell peppers would just be right around the corner. Our plan was coming together quite nicely. That is until we encountered an small unexpected setback.

It seems that humans aren’t the only ones that like home grown vegetables. Apparently rabbits have a real taste for vegetables and worse, they don’t need to have the fruit for sustenance. They like the plant all by itself. And so, we were very surprised one morning when we awoke to find a tiny, 4″ long bare stem that was once a bell pepper plant. Unbelievable, I thought. I felt like I had been violated.

So now it  was time to fight back and off I went to the big box home improvement store. I returned armed with a defense strategy to thwart the bunny menaces. “They aren’t going to eat the fruits of my labor,” I told myself. And after another hour of labor and sweat in the mid-day sun, I was pretty pleased with the result.

With the bunny preventer all set up. It’s time to do a quick financial reckoning of our project. Let’s see add another $25.00 to the our previous expenses and we’re now into our future vegetables to the tune of $95.00. These babies better taste good! I can’t wait for the squirrels to figure out there’s not a top on this thing.

I’m convinced that the U.S. economy is driven by impulsiveness– and mostly mine. Recently I was in the mood for tomatoes and as I perused the produce section of our local grocery store, I was just unimpressed with the offerings claiming to be “home grown” tomatoes. Not to even mention the fact that they have the gall to charge you $3.00 per pound for these tasteless imitators.

So then in one of those fateful moments of mine, you know those moments where you proudly say to yourself, “I can do better than that”, I was off on a new project. My mission was to raise a better home grown tomato. So far so good.

This was all fine and good, but I had one tiny little problem, we don’t have a garden. No big deal there, I’ll just create one. And I had done this before five years ago or so, and learned what not to do. So this time I was going to build a “raised” garden. The ones with all organic matter in it, and built up high above our horrible clay soil, like you see on PBS’s “Victory Garden.” By golly, I’m going to do this right.

So after my usual and alarmingly frequent visit to the local Lowe’s store, (why don’t I have stock in this place?) I was back home armed with the materials to begin the project.

That was the easy part. Now the manual labor part. And as usual, my impulsiveness also happened to coincide with one of the hottest days so far this year. Great (sarcastically). But I was determined to see this thing through and off I went to test my resistance to heat exhaustion.

Now, I could bore you with all of the preparatory things that I had to do like cut out the sod, dig out six inches or so of soil, set the landscape timbers and secure them in the ground, but that would take a lot of time and space in this blog. So suffice it to say, roughly three hours later and an internal body temperature approaching 102°F, I had the awesome raised garden that I was looking for. Sure hope the tomatoes, and also a bell pepper plant that I snuck in there, like their new home!

At this point we’re into these tomatoes for about $70.00. (Don’t do the math on that.) These tomatoes  are going to be worth it, I have convinced myself. And there is that sense of accomplishment from a job well done that you can’t put a price on. But the story doesn’t end here, so come back later and I’ll tell you the rest of the tomato story.