our garden granddad

We planted our tomatoes some time ago.  They are growing so fast they need to be tied up weekly- as is our grass but that's another story. And as you can see it won't be long before we'll have our first red fruit. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to biting into my first tomato, yum! And this year we will be using nine foot poles because our plants kept on falling over last year; ugh what a mess it was.

It won't be long before this baby turns red!

Each and every year during tomato season I get a bit misty thinking about our very first year here when we planted our first garden in our yard. It was tended by us with care, believe me we didn't really have many friends being new to this community. So the tomatoes kept us occupied when we weren't going back and forth to the baseball field with Matthew and Eric, where by the way we did eventually make some friends.

The guardian of the garden...Linus our eldest cat.

We live in a very rural area. One day I was sitting out on the back porch in a big t-shirt and my undies reading a book in the sunshine and something caught my eye.  There in the garden I could see the top of the head of an old man bobbing up and down atop the rows of my tomatoes. He was checking - actually inspecting my plants. I went in told Bill and put on some shorts and we walked out to meet and greet our garden guest. As it turns out he was the Great-Granddad of two of the boys the kids played ball with, his grandson was one of the few men we had met and considered a friend in the short time that we had been living here.

One of our many rows of tomato's they're a little more than 3 feet tall now. 

We chatted and he asked us about our family, what church we attended the usual and necessary niceties of southern conversation and we filled him in about where we had come from. He stayed for a while so I gathered that we passed his inspection...hehe! I think he was impressed that we were from NY and knew how to do a garden but he was playing it close to the vest at this point. He was actually quite adorable and at the very least in his mid 80's by my estimation. So we talked about our garden, if we fertilized or not, how early we planted , if we were organic, planted heirlooms  or if we used compost then after a time we said our goodbyes and went on his way.

This is the leaf of an heirloom tomato call German Johnson 

The very next time we went to a baseball game with the boys we saw his grandson whose my age and he was grinning from ear to ear. He recounted this to us, he said when his Granddad got home from our house he took out his phone book and called some the other old timers from our community and told them "you better plow under your gardens gentlemen, those Yankees down the road  have a garden that will put y'all to shame!"  

Beautiful flowers yes?

Granddad visited most every year after that and our friendship bore fruit. He got a kick with the fact that we knew what we were doing. Bill and I both grew up in the suburbs and always had gardens we weren't city dwellers but Granddad had an idea of New York and he was sticking to it! And Bill and I? We came to look forward to his yearly visits and were tickled that he enjoyed us and taking a peek at our garden. Granddad lived until he was 100, bless his heart.