Surprise!

Sometimes surprises are very nice.  When I got home last night from being away for the weekend, Joey surprised me with a freshly tilled garden!  A friend had been going by the house with a tractor that had a rototiller on it and Joey asked if he could turn my garden over.  And he did, for free, even.  So now I can't wait for it to stop raining so I can put some seeds in the ground.  And I have come to a decision about gardening in the ground versus containers.  For the last few weeks as I have been collecting seed packets and checking out books from the library on gardening, I have been debating about what to do about the garden in case we end up moving this summer.  I was worried that our house may sell and we would have to move before my vegetables were ready to harvest.  I didn't want to leave my vegetables behind for someone else to eat.  

ready for vegetables

To tell you the truth, I was being a little selfish about my tomatoes!  But this past weekend I was reminded that sharing plants as well as the harvest is what gardening is all about.  I have been growing tomato seeds in my dining room window for a couple weeks now and they are getting too big for the little seed-starting tray.  So I started to transplant them into larger biodegradable plastic cups.  I brought home 7 seedlings to share with my family this weekend.  I brought 3 little tomato plants to my aunt's house for Easter and shared them with my Grandma and Grandpa who grow tomatoes in hand-made upside down containers and my aunt and uncle who have a garden that grows bigger every year.  The remaining 4 will hopefully produce lots of tomatoes for my mom, dad, and sister in their backyard garden.  

As I swapped chicken raising stories with my uncle and listened to my Grandma say she was so sad when she saw lamb for sale in the grocery store, it reminded me that gardening, raising livestock, and being a homesteader, whether you live in the country or the city, wouldn't work without sharing; whether it's seedlings, homemade bread, stories and advice or time and labor.  And the same goes with this blog.  I am so happy to share my experiences with everyone who reads this blog, the good, the bad, and the ugly (like that nasty bruise on my behind!)  So I am going to start some seeds in the ground, as well as some in containers.  And if I have to leave my garden behind, I hope whoever inherits it enjoys my tomatoes.  It will be my house-warming gift to them.  

Oh yeah, as I said earlier, some surprises are good.  And some are not-so-good, but a little funny.  With a long weekend off of school, the kids in the town where I work got a little creative and decided to change the sign outside the library.  There isn't a cover or a lock to protect the movable letters and you don't need a ladder to reach them.  So when I got to work this morning, I found the letters on both sides of our sign a little out-of-whack.  Some of the letter tiles were even stacked next to the front door.  Apparently, the new message was a little offensive so a kind citizen removed parts of it.  They came into the library this afternoon to make sure I found the letters they took down.  I'll never know what it said, but I'll tell you, it's not the first time it's happened!  I know some people in town were probably a little off-put by these shenanigans but it kind of makes me laugh.  It's just one of those things I imagined would happen in a small town in the country where the kids don't have much to do.