Tomatoes!

Lisa and I are like pigs in sh*$ at the moment -- we harvested our first Cherokee Purple tomatoes. These are an heirloom variety, meaning they weren't bred for cross-country travel or to look all firm, round and red in your grocery store, they were bred for TASTE. Since becoming a food snob I discovered the beauty of a truly delicious tomato. We started growing Cherokees last year, and I'm so happy that they are doing wonderfully this year. Look at these beauties:


mmm...so delicious. I think they look kind of like macintosh apples....


And keeping with our theme of weird purply - colored veggies, we're also growing a chocolate beauty bell pepper:


They are doing really well, too, and are just starting to turn. We could eat them now as green peppers, but we want to get the chocolaty effect. Yes, it is growing upside down. Why? Because they are cool.

I also wanted to add a few photos of my perennials for you to see. I started a new flower bed this year, made up entirely of native perennials. Many I started from seed, so when I put the little plants in the ground this spring, they looked very small and sad. I knew it would take them a while to get big and beautiful, and wasn't even expecting any of them to flower this first year. It has been a wonderful surprise to see so many of them in bloom already:

Butterflyweed, grown from seed


Bee balm, grown from seed

Phlox, mail ordered bareroot


The yellow flowers are coreopsis, which I bought as a small plant. It has tripled in size. There are also some Ox-eye sunflowers (grown from seed) behind it. They are also yellow so it's tough to tell them apart in this photo. I also have asters, liatris, and big and little bluestem in this garden...