It has been raining here off and on for the last four days. One tomato plant had a limb break because it wasn’t sufficiently supported. The rains have been really heavy, so I’m surprised that’s the only damage.

Today was the first clear day since the last post about the progress of the garden 4 days ago. I thought it would be fun to take comparison pics of the garden as it grew (wish I had that thought when we started it).

This is a pic of the garden on the 8th, and below it is a pic of it yesterday. I knew it had ‘fleshed’ out more but I was surprised to see it grew about 4-6″ depending on the plants. It would be fun to setup a camera again for the fall planting to see if I can get a small video of it growing in time lapse. Think J1 and I should try that.

In the meantime, I babysat and cleaned (just a little) for Mom and Pooh today. She gave me the money to get a pressure canner and some jars. WooHoo. We are going to check out the Farmer’s Market weekend after next and hopefully I can get a jump start on building up the pantry downstairs.

At least the pics give me incentive to start double digging the next section of the garden. I’m hoping in a couple of years to have 1/2 of the backyard (equal to about 1/3 acre) planted for our family and to supplement my other families. Mom was telling me how Great Grandma Ward used to keep her pantry in a cool cellar and how she dusted it every day. She said she could remember seeing wall-to-wall shelving brimming with everything you could think of, especially her favorite, pickled baby corn. That was the 40′s before computers. She said Lula Belle even had made her own cute sticky labels stuck to the jars. Wonder if she had a printing press???

If you want to find your local farmer’s market, I found a neat site linked from our farmers market website, called LocalHarvest.org .

Technorati Tags: garden, growing, canning