Gardening on a Mission!

We always had a garden at home.  When we found out where we were going to be living on our mission I was thrilled to see there was a balcony off our living room. Immediately I thought we would be able to raise lettuce and maybe a few herbs.  When we arrived we discovered that our balcony faces east so there would only be sun for a couple of hours in the morning.  That would not work for a garden.  Disappointing.

What to do, what to do?  Well,  a month or so ago I put us on a list of farms and gardens which sell to the public and/or have pick your own.  We get lots of notices, most of which are further away than we want to drive.  This week we received word that there were pick your own tomatoes!  Yay!!!  And I really mean YAY!!!  I love real tomatoes.  The tomatoes we buy in the store are totally tasteless and not at all juicy.  So I talked Dear One into a gardening trip.  The J's went with us, too.  So nice.

This is what we picked:

Dear One picked the berries.  Some of the tomatoes are Brandywine, which are very very flavorful.  The others (in the foreground) also taste wonderful.  I may be on tomato overload for a few days but since it only happens a few weeks a year, I don't mind the skin rash and tummy issues..  At least, not much...

Elder and Sister J gave us the Gravenstein apples, a new variety to me.  The corn is yellow and white, which is what we prefer.  My father always raised Butter and Sugar corn back in the old days when I was in my youth.  I personally picked hundreds of bushels of that wonderful corn to sell at the roadside stand, to sell at Tunbridge World's Fair (which is a September tradition), and for my father to peddle to the stores in our local area. 

Seeing that corn always brings back happy memories.  One of those memories being that our corn piece is where I met Dear One for the first time, when he came over to help my father with the corn picking.  True story.  May I say that he must have seen something there because as far as physical appearance, well at 5 o'clock in the morning, after walking through the wet cornfield, with pollen from the tassels, and "rain" from the cornstalks making all of us soaking wet, we were a sight to behold.  It was much more fun to pick corn at mid-day, but that was not the time we did it.  By 7 o'clock my father would have finished the milking chores and came down to pick us corn pickers up  to bring us back up on the hill for breakfast.  Often Mother would have made us hot chocolate.  Hot chocolate is a comfort food for me.  Thus renewed, we would go back for another few hours of picking.  Lots of bushels every day.