I just went outside to stare at my plants again, and I discovered something that wasn’t there this morning! It’s the first official jalapeño!

OK, so it’s only a quarter of an inch long right now, but it’s there, and it wasn’t there just this very morning! Wheeee!

Lin spent today grooming the yard. He mowed and did the edging, and then he went crazy trimming the trees. It looks great, except that now we can see the junk the Insane Neighbors have stacked along the fence oh so much more clearly. Oh well, those trees really needed to be trimmed. The yard looks great!

And here’s your daily tomato photo:

It’s still clinging tightly to the stem, so it isn’t really ready to pick yet. One more day? If it’s longer than that, I’ll have to suck on it instead of chew it, but I’ll be damned if I am getting shorted out of eating the first tomato of the season just as soon as it’s ready!

The best news of the day? Lots of the cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen! Yum!

You knew there was going to be a new photo of this silly tomato every day until I get to eat it, didn’t you?

Look at it. Just looooook at it. It’s almost red. Almost!

I’m guessing, going by the progression of the color change for the last two days, it will be ready for consumption on Sunday. I guarantee you it will be eaten before I go have teeth removed from my head, because I am not passing up the chance to eat the first tomato of the season due to some silly technicality like not being able to eat solid foods. I don’t care if it isn’t quite ripe on Monday, it will be eaten by Monday night when I have to start fasting.

But I’m betting it will be ready on Sunday, and then Lin and I shall have it for breakfast.

See, I knew it was changing colors this morning. It’s changed even more while I wasn’t staring at it today! Any day now it will be red, and I will be eating it.

Here’s a bonus photo of one of the blossoms on my TAM Jalapeños [TAM = Texas A&M — that’s where it was developed]. The flowers are so pretty, and I can’t wait to see what they taste like! From what I have read, they are high producers, and with three of them, maybe we’ll be overrun with (mild) hot peppers too. Tomatoes and jalapeños, can you say salsa? Yes!

I’d have loved to sit out on the porch longer, but it’s just too darn hot. 92°F at 4:20 pm, and it isn’t even June yet. This summer is going to be a scorcher! I’m not looking forward to the extreme heat or the extreme electric bills. My plants are well suited for the hot weather, so they are going to love it, but I’m going to have to re-adapt to sweating while sitting still. Can’t afford to run the AC all day every day!

The two banana peppers grew another inch in the last 24 hours, so I decided to go ahead and pick them. Thought I would show them off before I cut them up for tonight’s salad.

They taste so good!

I thought I would show off my banana peppers. I think I’ll be picking them this weekend. They look ready to pick, don’t they?

Where did that tomato come from? I stick my nose on those plants every day, sometimes more than once a day, and I would swear there was no tomato on that plant yesterday. What a pleasant surprise to start my dreary and potentially rainy day!

I think this is the Super 100 Cherry Tomato. I say I think that’s what it is, because I don’t know which is which anymore. When I re-potted them, I put the little plastic tabs back into the pots, and sometime between Sunday and yesterday, every last one of them has gone missing. I doubt it can be blamed on critters, because they might knock them out of the pots, but they don’t usually run off with them. I suspect a two-legged critter by the name of Annoying Boy. I’ll have to compare the unlabeled pots with the labeled ones and try to figure out which is which, I guess.

I guess adding the composted manure on Sunday, and the last few days of coffee grounds and leftover coffee have done that plant some good. I have been particularly focusing on that one, because it looked really bad on Sunday with yellow leaves that were starting to curl up and fall off, and generally just bad color to the whole plant. I thought it was on the way to an early death. This morning, it’s green and perky … and it has a tomato on it!

The photo makes it look huge. I assure you, it isn’t. Right now my precious first tomato is about the size of a dime. It better not fall off or get eaten. I would be so heartbroken. I can’t wait to eat my own tomatoes.

There are also three peppers that have set on the Banana Pepper plant. Woo hoo! I am so excited!

Also, I am somewhat pleased with the above photo, so I uploaded a larger version so you can see the detail. Considering how dark and windy it is outside, and the fact I can’t use a flash when using the macro settings, I was surprised by how well it turned out … and how you can see the dew on the little hairs. I love my camera.

I have to take my tomato happy self to Walgreens, and then I have to attempt to restore the kitchen to some kind of order. I have totally ignored the dishes for far too long, as I almost always do.

But I have a tomato and some peppers! On top of the ice dispenser on the fridge being repaired yesterday, this week is going pretty damn well so far. Just wish I felt better, but I guess I can’t have everything my way.

Dinner was different tonight. It’s the first time I made these! They were very tasty.

Take that Freebirds! No more do I have to drive to your location and pay you ridiculous amounts of money for ridiculous sized burritos!

Since it’s a product I have been known to buy in the past, there has been a rather large recall of puffed rice and puffed wheat cereal produced by Malt-O-Meal. It’s sold under a variety of store and private brands as well, so if anyone reading this tends to buy the bagged cereals, they might want to check that it hasn’t been recalled. 23 people in 14 states are sick, and the culprit seems to be the cereal.

Lemon and mint fried chicken, saffron jasmine rice, and steamed mushrooms and broccoli. Mmmm. Tasty!

I increased the size of my “farm” this morning. After I finished my coffee on the porch, I started puttering around in the back yard and found two large tub-like pots. Since I still had some good dirt, some compost, and some seeds, I thought I might as well plant something. The seeds are quite old, so I have no idea if any of them will come up (I put in just about all of them in hopes four of each will germinate — I may end up transplanting some elsewhere), but it’s worth trying. So now I have cucumbers and squash that I hope will grow up and produce some produce!

I also planted one small clay pot with marigolds. Hey, I had the seeds. Maybe they’ll grow!

Also, I am thinking of putting some of our pre-compost mulch on the top of all my containers. There was already some kind of critter pawing around in one of my boxes. No damage done, but still. The neighborhood cats have all sorts of locations to paw around in, so I think they can leave my boxes alone.

I can’t believe it’s already 2 pm, and I spent the whole morning outside messing around with pots, dirt and seeds. I wouldn’t have come in when I did, but it started raining. Boo. Hiss. Though it’s good for the plants, so I shouldn’t complain. It’s a good thing the rain forced me to come in, because I really need to thaw some hamburger and get the chili for dinner started anyway. I should probably do the dishes from this weekend too. Boo. Hiss.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I just ordered a delivery pizza from Papa John’s. Well, how long do you think I can continue to exist, at least in a state that could be described as happy, without pizza?! It’s been close to two weeks! I am having severe pizza withdrawal symptoms!

Of course, it can’t possibly be as good as homemade, but we are desperate for pizza. There were a few places that might have made a pizza closer to the ones I make, but they also wanted entirely too much gold for the precious, precious little things. Papa John’s is at least reasonably good (we ate them for years and years), is large in size, and economically priced.

I’m starving. Hope the pizza gets here soon so I can totally pig out, and believe me, after two weeks of no pizza, I will be pigging out!