Look!

That's SIX jars of tomatoes, from my very own garden!

I just can't express how fascinated I am with the whole gardening and canning process this year. I mean, this spring it was just dirt and logs in that spot. We cut the logs to hold the soil; prepared the soil and planted stuff; keep it watered and keep the bugs and caterpillars picked off; then gather food and can it, and we have food for later! That's just cool.

Even though I grew up around gardening and keeping livestock, I live in a generation that is far removed from the source of its food, in general. This is the first year I've done well with a garden of my own, and it's a novel thought that tomatoes come from dirt and not from the store.

If you are interested in gardening on a small scale, I would highly recommend the books Square Foot Gardening and Rodale's Vegetable Garden Problem Solver.

P.S. - if you live in Alabama and are growing tomatoes, you might want to go and take a close look at your plants! I just went out to the garden and found a whole new batch of hornworm eggs and one worm. The eggs look like tiny yellow-green pearls, and usually I find them on the underside or edges of the upper, tender leaves of the plant. Today, though, I found them on the tops of the leaves, lower leaves, stems, the strings holding up the vines, and even a couple on the tomatoes themselves. Relocate them, squash them, do whatever it is you do, but DON'T leave them on your defenseless tomato plants! They will eat through your plants like a weedeater, eat holes all the way through the fruit, and will not stop until it's time to turn into a moth so they can go lay more eggs. That would be a shame, especially considering how hard it is to find tomatoes right now.