I may wake up in the morning tangled in tomato vines..

So for the last two years I’ve scooped a LOT of horse poop…and chicken poop…and rabbit poop…and more recently goat poop…I’ve also raked a crap ton of leaves..and not the romantic red maple and golden sycamore leaves of autumn…no, here in the Arizona mountains, our scrubby oak trees have it all backwards…They drop their pointy, tiny, messy little leaves in the Springtime, right when you want to be out enjoying the blossoms, and the grass peaking up from the mud, and the daffodils braving the frigid mornings…all of a sudden you walk out and your deck is covered in these dang leaves… Ok, rant over…So what do you do with a crap ton of manure and scrub oak leaves, and grass clippings, and pond refuse, and all the other muck and mire a farm produces? You compost the $#!+ out of it….literally 😉 My degree is in biology actually…not art…so the nerdy little scientist in me has had WAAAAAY too much fun over the last two years making compost…Words like Aerobic Decomposition, Nitrogen Content, Potash, Oxygenation, Aeration, and Humidification have made my mornings dealing with steaming piles of poop feel much more purposeful…I was channeling the gentlemen farmers of yesteryear…I was a regular Thomas Jefferson for Pete’s sake… Well after a couple years of brushing compost out of my hair and spending mornings muck-a-luck deep in the crap, I have these gorgeous, healthy, organic, fertilizer free tomatoes to show for it…oh and about three more steaming tons of compost just waiting for next year’s garden.. I came back from a business trip in NYC this week to tomato vines cascading all the way down my 8′ fence, covering my roof top garden, spreading onto my deck railing, basically taking over the joint…We had a cold spring, so I procrastinated planting the seedlings..before I left town, I barely had a red tomato in sight…Now I have more than I know what to do with..I’ll be Caprese’ing the heck out of everything..The basil of course did not have the patience to wait for the tomatoes to redden, but I’ve been trying to keep it from going to seed..I should have enough to enjoy for a few more weeks..The peppers were equally impatient…so salsa may require some store bought components…but these gorgeous tomatoes stand on their own two feet with a little salt…and this coming from the girl that wouldn’t touch a tomato until she was in her 20’s!

I love the way the harvest looks on my tableware design “Botanical Veggies”…The pasta sets are still available online if you’re looking for serving dishes..Amazon is a great place to start searching for our designs..these can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=certified+interanational+botanical+veggies&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Acertified+interanational+botanical+veggies

I will decide which direction to go with all these gorgeous rubies and post some food pics very soon!