Last Day of School Harvest

To celebrate the last day of school, I cooked Michael's favorite dinner (well one of his favorites) of meatloaf and potatoes and our very first serving of homegrown squash. What a hit! I roasted potatoes and the squash in Italian salad dressing in the oven at 350 degrees for the whole time the meatloaf was cooking--super simple, and delicious! Meghan and I have also enjoyed our very first homegrown grape tomatoes this week--definitely worth the trouble and the wait! After I harvested all of our lettuce, I was left with an empty bed....so I experimented with taking cuttings from squash and from tomatoes and planting them in the new bed to try to make new plants. While the squash experiment didn't work, the tomato plant experiment did! I now have 3 new Mr. Stripey tomato plants growing! Since I'm training the tomatoes to grow vertically on a trellis, I have to do a pretty serious pruning every couple of weeks. I'll be planting a couple of pruned branches every couple of weeks, and will hopefully have tomatoes through Thanksgiving! :) See, squash and tomatoes are a lot like kids in kindergarten. Once you get them started the right way and in their routine, they just don't stop until it's all over! And, as Meghan put it, "there's nothing like a homegrown tomato." So, our end-of-the-year teacher gifts were 4 tomato plants with a card that read, "Let's "ketchup" sometime" and included our blog addresses. Hopefully, these fabulous ladies who took care of my kids and got them started the right way this year will think of them and smile every time they pick a ripe tomato this summer. Enjoy!