Sick Day Excuses and Hidden Tomatoes

I took this really poor quality and more than slightly askew video of Mas playing guitar and the dogs freaking out yesterday. It's pretty representative of how we've spent the last few days. We haven't done much except laze on the couch due to the sickness, but I'm feeling quite a bit better today. I desperately need to clean the house and make some real food. We majorly broke our no processed food rule yesterday and had Uncle Eddies Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies, Vanilla Nadamoo, Honest Tea Sublime Mate, Reed's Extra Ginger Beer (the best!) and a pizza from Whole Foods. Yeah, that's a pretty big lapse. We just weren't up to cooking and I have to say that it did make us pretty happy to have all of our favorite junk food at once...oh well. At least the pizza was just crust, sauce and tons of veggies.

We did manage to go out yesterday to pick up a craigslist 4 track and 24 tomato plants from the farmer's market. We chose some Brandywines, Yellow Pears, Caspian Pinks and Sugar Plum Grapes that we're going to sneakily plant here and there around the apartment building and parking lot. I seriously doubt that anyone will notice, let alone care, but we went with the cheapest we could find in case they get weed whacked by the overzealous lawn guys. We planted 6 last week and they seem to be doing fine so far. My tomato seeds have also started to sprout, but I'm a little worried about damping off. I'm really hoping they'll make it because I don't want to have to start all over and be even further behind. Thankfully, if it comes to that, our growing season is long enough that we'll still have time to get a good crop. We'll see how it goes.

We finally found pecan shell mulch at an awesome organic nursery in Garland, so we mulched both beds last week and they look much better. It's keeping everything moist and the plants are a lot less droopy. The herb bed is filling up quickly. We picked up regular and garlic chives, rosemary, butterfly weed and more oregano at Rohdes while we were getting the mulch. They had tons of herbs that I hadn't seen locally and I really wanted to get ten times what we did. I'm trying to control my plant lust because of our limited space, but it's difficult. When the chard can't take the heat any longer, basil will take its place and maybe we can fit a few new plants on that side. I'll try to get some pictures of the beds, but they just aren't that photogenic. They look better in person, really, I promise. Cinder blocks aren't exactly beautiful, but lots of our neighbors have told us how much they like them and a few of them have started planting their own. A good sign!