Sunday, June 21, 2009

From the garden...over a week ago

See that little bitty bell pepper...this was taken on the 12th. Of this month. They are now at least 2 inches if not 3 inches long.
That little jungle of tomato plants is the little cherry type tomatoes...they were planted a couple weeks before the Super Fantastics below. The cherry tomatoes had several little tomatoes back then but so far none are ripe.
'My' tomatoes were blooming when I took these pictures, but now have several tomatoes. A ripe one is still a long way in the future...at least for these.
When I was a kid, I loved the tiny tomatoes....what we call cherry tomatoes now. I don't know why, but we never raised them...when I was a teen, I remember some coming up in the flower bed in front of the porch. I think they were volunteers...but by then they had lost a lot of their appeal to me.

Back to when I was just a kid, you know 8 or 10 years old...somewhere along that age...we had a neighbor that lived up the road from us. And every now and then he would bring a bag of those tiny tomatoes to us...I always had the impression at that time that he brought them just for me but don't really know it for sure.

His name was Zack, and it would either be him or his son, Leonard. Zack did not drive a car...but he had a Ford tractor. If he needed to run down to the store, he would get on it and we would see him pass by. If I was outside, sometimes he would throw me some change, other times he would yell something like "Loaded for Bear!" I don't remember if there were any words preceding those, nor do I have any idea how he came up with saying it. But I always smile when I think of that now. I think it was just his way of being funny.

And I am pretty sure it was him that would sometimes come down and sit on our front porch with a towel wrapped around him while our mom cut his hair. I actually think she did this for him and one other neighbor. She had no training, and I really do not know how good she was at it. I don't know who cut their hair the rest of the time, but I definitely don't feel like mom cut it all the time.