It’s a quiet and dreary day here today. The only sounds are the occasional bird and the steady beat of the rain on the ground. Guess I don’t need to worry about watering the garden today!

I’m really hopeful that our tomato plants start to flourish pretty soon. This year I decided to start the tomato plants from seed inside. They grew great and then got tall & leggy. The starter containers I used were very small and I think I should have upgraded them to a larger container a few weeks ago. This whole garden thing has been a learning experience for Dave and I though…so I guess we’ll eventually figure it out. Right now the tomato plants look small and sickly, but of the 20 I planted I’ve got high hopes for eight of them.

We planted potatoes, yellow and white onions and sunflowers at Dave’s parent’s house. We’ve previously planted potatoes there and had great success. If we have a good crop again this year, we’ve got to figure out how to best store them. According to some preliminary reading, our basement may prove to be a good place to store them, but we’ll have to keep looking into our options. I need to figure out how to store the onions, should that crop prove bountiful as well.

If our tomato plants actually produce more than we can consume, I want to learn how to can my own diced tomatoes for use in sauces and things. So we’ll see.

We’d had a problem with wild turkeys taking dust baths on top of our potato mounds and exposing (thus killing) our seed potatoes. But my sister-in-law, Elizabeth, back in IL had a splendid idea of hanging swinging tin pie plates to a wooden post to frighten them away. So later today I’m going to pick up some pie plates. My parents-in-law love having the visiting turkeys, but we just need to keep them out of the garden.