Learning new gardening skills

Thanks to Chuck stopping by this blog and inviting me to watch his tomato video, I learned a new thing or two about tomato gardening. The first was that I should prune back leaves that had no flowers to improve the fruit yield. So this morning I snipped an armful of 'terminal branches'. The photo above is the 'after' snap. You can see the fruit a lot more clearly, and I suspect the sun can ripen the fruit better this way too. I probably could have cut more back, but I'm still a little chicken. Thanks Chuck for the great instruction!

Thanks also to all my blogger friends who've encouraged me along the way. The tomatoes are ripening in a cascade now.

And there are still more to harvest. These are as local as possible, and it's nice to completely understand the growing conditions and soil inputs. With food shortages around the world even though this is a small contribution, every tomato I grow myself is one freed up in the market to feed someone else. And I have to say it's a real shame that so many tons of healthy tomatoes were destroyed because of lack of traceability of the source of the salmonella outbreak.

I enjoyed this video that Chuck also highlighted on his site. Viva la Revolucion!

I can't resist posting this photo taken yesterday of my great-nephew Colin enjoying the robot spelling his name at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. It's really a great place to take kids for engaging their imagination in a hands on way. By way of restaurant review - we had lunch at the museum's Cafe Primavera. Clean and bright it has some interesting and healthy choices. However someone must really teach them the difference between spaghetti, angel hair pasta and linguine. I ordered "Spaghetti Pomodoro", which was described as 'angel hair pasta...'. When it was served it was actually linguine with a fresh tomato sauce, which was quite good, but the pasta was limp and overcooked. Colin enjoyed his penne with meat sauce and Dad pronounced his cheeseburger with fries, great!