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From the Archives
Archive for October, 2009
My First Official Garden Injury
As accident-prone as I am, I’m surprised I’ve gone this long without hurting myself. I’ve had the usual splinters, blisters, aching muscles. But I finally did it. The thing I made fun of other people for doing (and admitting to on their blogs.)
I cut my own finger with my pruners.
Sigh.
So here’s how it happened. I was working in the garden at Emily’s school yesterday (which I volunteered to overhaul—it is a mess!) doing some clean-up and figuring out what I want to plant next spring. Mostly, I was clipping the bare flower stems from the hostas. My routine went roughly like this:
- Bend over, clip a few stems.
- Stand up, shove bottle in baby’s mouth, pick up dropped toddler toy.
- Snip the stems into little pieces and throw said pieces back into the bed (I can’t compost on school grounds, so this is as close as I’m getting. And I walk the kids to school, so there’ s no way I was hauling it all home!)
- Bend down to snip more stems.
- Get interrupted by fellow parent. “Hey, whatcha doing?” was the general greeting.
- Stop and politely make smalltalk until parent leaves to chase toddler.
- Repeat.
So after about six times of stopping politely and making smalltalk, I decided I would keep working while I talked so that I could get the bed done before Emily got out of school. And then someone came up to me with questions about a committee I volunteered for, and I talked while I worked.
Note to self: I cannot, repeat, CAN NOT, prune and talk at the same time.
So, I’m snipping stems, and I’m talking about a fundraiser, and all of a sudden — Ow! I look down (in disbelief) and, sure enough, my index finger is dripping blood. I keep talking, not wanting my fellow parent to realize that I was clumsy enough to cut my own finger, and grab the tissue I had recently been wiping my toddler’s snotty nose with, wrapping it around my bloody finger and chatting away as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
She kept talking, so I don’t think she even noticed what was happening. I, on the other hand, was waiting for her to leave so that I could see how badly I’d cut myself. (I am such a dork.)
It’s really not that deep, and it’s already healing. But I’ve learned a couple of valuable lessons from this:
1. I can’t talk and prune at the same time.
2. I need to do my school gardening when there are no parents on the playground. Perhaps around midnight 
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Tomatoes I Won’t Be Growing Again
So, I talked about the five tomatoes I grew this year that I absolutely fell inlove with, and now it’s time to talk about those that were less than impressive. It’s not that any of them were bad tomatoes, necessarily. But I’m on a smallish urban lot, and if I’m growing something here, I better love it, or I’ve wasted valuable garden space.
‘Heatherington Pink’ was a prolific producer, but other than that, there’s not much I can say for this tomato. The flavor was pretty run of the mill, and though they were a pretty pink color, they’re just not all that interesting.
‘Dix Doights di Napoli’ was a pretty big disappointment. Production was not high, and when I did get a tomato here and there, it invariably ended up with blossom end rot. I dried a few in the oven, and they were all right dried, but I definitely prefer my ‘Polish Linguisa’ and ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes for that purpose.
‘Green Grape’ is a nice enough tasting tomato, and it is always interesting to eat green tomatoes. However, my kids never really did come around to trusting me that it was ok to eat these particular green tomatoes. That’s half of our tomato-eating household that vetoed them, so out they go.
‘Early Girl’ is one of the two hybrid tomatoes we grew this year, and we won’t be growing them again. Part of the reason for this is that we’d just rather grow heirlooms. The other part is that they didn’t taste all that different from the tomatoes we buy in the grocery store. I was not impressed.
‘Manitoba’ was one of the two early varieties I grew this year (the other was ‘Subarctic Plenty.’) It actually didn’t produce that much earlier, and the fruits were not very good–too firm for my taste and rather bland. If I grow an early variety next year (and I don’t know that I’ll even waste the space because neither of the early varieties I grew exactly blew me away, taste-wise) I’ll probably go with ‘Subarctic Plenty’ rather than ‘Manitoba.’
Like I said, I didn’t necessarily hate any of these tomatoes, but they just didn’t do it for me, for one reason or another. Have you grown any of these? Am I being too hard on some of them?