day trip and a selfie

So yesterday, we decided to drive 80 miles (and then 80 miles back) to a nursery out in the middle of fucking nowhere in the hill country because that's where our neighbor Frank of the Bountiful Garden always bought his plants. Of course he was buying them wholesale and reselling them when he had his local nursery business so it made sense for him to drive out there.

The stuff in his garden is always twice as big and twice as plentiful as ours. But then his is in full sun all day and ours is in shade by 3 o'clock in the afternoon and he's been growing food forever and we just started a few years ago, but we are expecting big things from these little plants nonetheless.

Alan, Frank's son, gave us directions...drive to Schulenburg and turn right, when you get to the big church in Hostyn (which is a blink on the road) turn left and it's on that road. 'That' road is a one lane county road that just goes off into, well, the county.

There was, after a spate of open fields and pasture and an occasional building in the distance, a small sign that said 'greenhouses' and you could get a glimpse of some big structures back there but mostly it just looked like a run-down country house and out buildings at the end of a long drive across a cattle guard, two as it turned out, so we kept going and got deeper and deeper into nowhere. When the road ended at another road, we turned around, back to the greenhouses sign and sure enough, it did have hours on it.

So we followed the drive back to where there were actually 4 large greenhouses behind the house but all the doors were shut and no one was around. Finally, I knocked on the back door and the lady showed us over to the biggest greenhouse, 4 units wide, that was packed with vegetable and herb plants in 4 and 6 packs and in sprouting trays and it was amazing. I didn't think to take a picture until we had left.

We did, however, stop and take some pictures at this church, a Czech Catholic church that was first established in the late 1800s with a huge grotto, and shrines all over the place, to Mary and to certain dignitaries or saints? (one of them looked like it had a relic box in it), the stations of the cross each done with it's own little shrine all made out of the same whatever rocks that they could get, find, or dig up and two canons with cannonballs dedicated to a father and son that fought on different sides of the Civil War. I wish I could say that the grotto and shrines looked pretty neat and were cool folk art but to tell the truth it was all pretty ugly.

Unfortunately I failed to take pictures of anything but the grotto.

there's a dead Jesus laying on a bench in there

Last weekend Marc planted the 10 (surviving) tomato plants I had gotten at the local feed store about three weeks ago. Now I have 3 four packs of heirloom tomatoes to put in. I think with these and the ones already in, that will just about fill the big garden and I still have zucchini, japanese eggplant, cucumbers, green and orange bell peppers, banana peppers, jalapeno peppers, and watermelon to plant. And okra, which I haven't acquired yet.

me and my still to plant veggies

The little garden still has carrots, lettuce, and spinach but the spinach is starting to bolt and the lettuce won't be far behind so it's time to pull those out. Even so I'm thinking there's going to be some vegetables planted in the flower beds.