2024, Food, gardening, Mysteries

Tomato Time!

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For a couple of years, my tomatoes have struggled and I haven’t had the massive numbers coming off the plants as I’ve had in the past. The same issue (inconsistent watering) came up over and over again when I discussed it with experts and searched on the internet.  But I know my bales and I know myself and my habits and I just couldn’t accept this was the issue.  I did find just a couple of sites that talked about calcium deficiency due to the high nitrogen that is needed in getting the bales conditioned at the beginning of the season.

Ignoring the experts, I changed back to the ammonium sulfate conditioner that I used to use, added some organic calcium-rich Tomato-tone supplement and I really ramped up the egg shells added around the base of each plant.  I’m happy to say that my intuition was correct… with these changes I am now rolling in tomatoes, especially my little cherries. 

That means it’s time to start coming up with tomato recipes. 

I made my favorite pasta/onion/cherry tomato skillet dish.  So so easy and yummy.   Salsa is up next; I have a few hot peppers left to add.   I bought a baguette yesterday for a panzanella salad; I certainly have enough basil for this too. (Made several jars of pesto last week.)  I’m thinking about a nice tomato and corn salad as well.

There will most likely be plenty of tomatoes left after that so I will probably freeze some and maybe make a couple of jars of tomato sauce.  Too many tomatoes is a nice problem to have after the last couple of years!

Can you think of a time that intuition has served you well?

34 thoughts on “Tomato Time!”

  2. I have several handmade instruments. One of the most precious to me is my Cloutier guitar. My friend Steve made it smaller, like a parlor-style guitar, with a narrower neck. I have short, stubby fingers instead of the long ones most musicians desire. He designed the guitar and built it for me, and it is most definitely mine.

    Many years ago, I played with a group of women over in the Mankato-St. Peter area. We were casual about it, but we called ourselves the Downhome Divas. Someone set up a gig at the Coffee Hag, an old town Mankato coffee shop and folk music venue. It turns out that in this case, I was the only guitar player. We had a mandocello, a mountain dulcimer, a hammered dulcimer, a clawhammer banjo, and others.

    I experienced a really strong inner voice that day before going over to Mankato. It felt like, “I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this.” I should have listened.

    I knew how to run a small sound system and how to set up a stage with microphones, speakers, and monitors. I was setting up and I put my guitar in its stand where I wanted to be, on the end near the wall, so I could adjust the sound if needed. It wasn’t right on the edge of the stage, but close. It was a very small area – very crowded for several musicians and their instruments and gear. People were excited and milling around, as people do. In the activity, my guitar got bumped and fell off the stage onto the floor. The headstock broke right off the neck, hanging there in a gruesome, shattered way, by the strings. The night was all over for me before it even began. I packed up and went home, devastated.

    Steve was able to fix the neck for me and you can hardly tell unless you look very closely. Of course, I was grateful, but he was a bit disgusted with me. It was just one of those things, but I should have listened to my intuition. Big, tough lesson about my inner voice.

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    1. Also, as an INFP, intuition plays a huge role in how I make decisions. Sometimes intuition is helpful. Other times it isn’t and I wish I was more analytical.

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  3. OT: I’ve had a really busy week. A week ago, on Wednesday, I learned that Pippin has a huge mass in his lower abdomen. It’s pressing on his urinary tract and his colon. He has been having some trouble getting his job done, and the doctor asked me about it as he was palpating his abdomen. Pippin had an x-ray and an ultrasound. Dr. Geoff thinks it’s a tumor, probably on the prostate, which is growing rapidly. Just since then, I’ve noticed Pippin having even more trouble doing his job. The doctor didn’t give me a time frame but I got the feeling that he didn’t think it would be long. I’m trying to get my mind around it, I guess.

    I’ve also been looking for a one-level, permanent home. It’s really challenging here in Northfield. I have to be diligent in my search, and they don’t come up for sale very often. Two came up, right across the street from each other, in the last week. The first wasn’t very good, but the second was incredible. I believed I had finally found my permanent home. After going to see it yesterday, I scrambled to get my mortgage pre-approval fixed for a higher asking price, then to get my offer in by the 4PM deadline. They opened the offers at 7PM. Someone offered an enormous price, cash, so I didn’t get it. I’m a little disappointed but it’s okay. I’ll find something eventually. I enjoy living mortgage free and I like to think the stairs help me stay healthy. I just don’t want to fall down the basement stairs. I don’t think I’d survive it.

    Thanks for listening, all. I needed to get it out.

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    The first intern I chose for my last employer I felt was exactly the right match for us. It was an intuitive response to her, but she also knew her stuff and was an excellent fit for us. She now works there.

    VS, good work. Listen to the intuition.

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    1. Oh Krista, I’m truly sorry about Pippin. Poor little guy.

      With regard to your housing situation, I think you’re right. It will sort itself out eventually.

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  5. I’ve told this story before here, but we’ve been at this so long there aren’t many old stories we haven’t told at one time or another. Besides, it’s my most intuition-y.

    Years ago, Robin and I had just finished walking around Lake Harriet and were on our way back to the car when we came upon an estate sale. We fairly quickly determined that the house had belonged to local writer Brenda Ueland. Along with the typical household items, there was a wall of books. The books were, for the most part, not in great shape.

    After an initial inspection of the upper floors, I made my way to the basement. There wasn’t much to be seen down there, just a rack of old clothes, the washer and dryer, and a boxful of copies of a biography Ueland had written about her mother. The books were heavily mildewed. Other shoppers took one look and went back upstairs, so I was alone—alone with a strange feeling there was something for me to find. I looked around in all the corners, even went through the pockets of the clothing on the rack but, other than a grocery list, found nothing.

    Beside the laundry tub there was a tall cabinet that had been built around the main sewer line—the soil stack—which had been painted white. The cabinet was apparently empty. But looking closer, I spied a second cylinder, also white and about the diameter of the soil stack, tucked behind the pipe.
    I pulled it out. It was a cardboard tube and it was filled with rolled up sheets of paper. When I unrolled them on top of the dryer I discovered they were a set of lithographic drawings signed and inscribed to Ueland by Arctic Explorer Fritjof Nansen. I’ve since learned that Nansen was a friend of the family and that Nansen and Ueland had an affair.

    Except for my intuition, there was no apparent reason for me to have lingered in the basement or to have searched it so thoroughly. After all, that tube of lithographs had escaped the notice of the estate sale agents when they staged the sale. You can imagine how their faces lit up when I took it upstairs and showed them. It was possibly the most valuable thing in the house. As a reward, the estate sale people offered me my choice of the books on the wall and I took a few but, as I said, they hadn’t been well cared for.

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      1. A bit off the subject – the ship I traveled on to the Antarctic Peninsula was the “Fridtjof Nansen” – the newest of the Hurtigruten Cruise Line ships. It was fabulous.

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  6. Okay.
    I’m sitting at home enjoying merlot and thinking that some Asiago would go with this.
    Glass 2. Absolutely need Asiago.
    Glass 3. Must go.
    Intuition kicks in or was it the notification that the Ohio State Patrol has a saturation presence near home?
    Stay home.

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  7. Husband has gone through a phase where he can guess the best word with which to start our nightly Wordle session. More frequently than expected, we manage to get the answer on the second guess (with no hints). I’ve also learned to wait with my first guess until he’s made a stab at it. If I try out at least the first couple of letters of his word, we have a much better chance at this.

    In May we got it in two tries a whopping 11 times; in June, 7 times. We totally skipped July, but August we had 3… So it seems to be waning, but it sort of amazes me.

    Intuition? Anyone else frequently get it in 2?

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    1. I am not sure how long I’ve been doing Wordle. Maybe I’ve done a thousand of them. I’m sure I have gotten it on the second guess at least three times, but probably not more than five or six times. Your success is quite impressive!

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      1. I always use the same strategy. I start with “AUDIO” for the vowels, followed by “STERN” for the “E” and the most frequently used consonants. Wordle’s stats say I have got it in 2 tries 13 times. So that means that when the vowels line up I guess well. It also means that yesterday the word was STERN, almost always the second guess. I do not do Wordle intuitively until the fourth or fifth guesses.

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        1. Like Jacque, I always start with the same word. I’m close to 1000 games as well and have 16 Twos. I am a pretty consistent Three/Four – I have about the same number of both of those. I remember reading someplace that the computer average is 3.67 or something like that. I figure that if I get it in Four, I’m pretty on par with the computer and I can live with that.

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        3. The Satistics page tells me I’ve completed 998 Wordles. My current streak (correct solutions in a row) is 383. My last streak was interrupted when I had the emergency surgery last year, and I missed the puzzle two days in a row. I use a different started word each day. The results show I have guessed the correct word 11 times on the first guess, 291 on the second, 537 on the third, 114 on the fourth, 34 on the fourth, and 8 on the sixth guess. I guess the remaining three Wordles I didn’t solve within the allotted six guesses.

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        4. I wouldn’t say never, I’m sure it has happened. I just use whatever word contains a sampling of letters that strike my fancy in the moment. For me, it’s not about the vowels. My starter word often has only one vowel, rarely more than two. My starter word today had two, neither of them correct. But, the first and the last letter of the word were correct and in the right place. Got the right word on my second guess.

          One game that I find particularly challenging is one I recently discovered. It’s the Quordle Daily Extreme. You get only 8 guesses to get all four words right, and it’s really tough. I use a different strategy for doing the Quordle and the Octordle.

          Correction to the statistics above: 34 on the fifth.

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  9. I probably don’t act on intuition all that often. I’m fairly analytical.

    I did have a traffic circle incident not too long ago where I likely avoided an accident by going with a feeling. As I was approaching the circle, there was a car entering immediately to my left. As the car approached the circle, the right turn signal came on. My first thought was Oh, that’s considerate of the driver – letting me know he’s planning on exiting, so I don’t have to wait for him. Yet I had a moment of hesitation and I braked and yielded, just in case. Good thing I did, because the driver didn’t make a right turn, but proceeded on through the circle. If I hadn’t stopped, I am pretty sure he would have barreled right into me.

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