Joe's Place

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.