Spun around a bit on CNN seeing if there was something that could piss me off enough to rant about it, but not really. This tried, but eh. So instead let’s talk about tomatoes. Specifically, mine. Debb and I put a garden in our yard, and holy God was that a lot of work. I estimated that I shoveled and moved about 1200 pounds of dirt and rock.

That’s “before”. I say “and rock” because that part of the yard was entirely infused with little rocks—we suspect the original owners who had a huge coal furnace in the basement dumped spent coal out there, or something. And a few years ago, rather than taking it all up, the then-owners covered it with topsoil. You can see the scraggly grass in the parts where I hadn’t dug yet; very little could actually grow in that dirt. Because it was mostly rock. And damn heavy when you move about 24 cubic feet of it.

That’s “after”. Actually, it’s after moving all the dirt out, putting in a new layer of topsoil, putting in the plants, and putting down a drip hose for watering (because tomatoes can’t survive if you touch their leaves with water directly, apparently). The plant in the upper right is basil, just for variety.

Then this is “much after”, like three weeks later I think, but I’m not sure. In the beginning we were kinda not sure that they were going to work, but they’re about the most goddamn spoiled tomatoes in the whole neighborhood, I’m sure. They got fresh topsoil, fertilizer balanced especially for tomatoes, some special Miracle-Gro garden soil, the drip hose to take care of their delicate watering needs, and Debb probably got angels to fly down and kiss them every morning or something, I dunno, goddamn kids get off my lawn mumble grumble.

So we’re gonna have approximately 17,000 tomatoes.