Upside Down Tomato Plants, Our Kitty & Our Neighbors

Last year, and even during this past winter, we would occassionally see the TV Commercial for the Topsy Turvy Tomato planter, http://www.topsygardening.com/. We were curious about how well it actually worked, but we weren't going to spend the $20 (its $9.99 now) for each hanging tomato we wanted. On one of the forums that I frequent, I found a website that tells you how to do it yourself, without having to buy the kit. http://oldfashionedliving.com/tomato2.html After reading this we decided to do it. So for the cost of 4 5 gallon buckets ($2.99 each) and 4 packs of tomatos (we planted 4 in our garden, 4 in buckets and gave the others away). So for about $25, here's our upside down tomato plants. We planted them a couple of days before the ones in our garden, but these have little tomatoes on them, while the ones in our garden do not.

This is only a couple of the baby tomatoes on this plant....

This is our roma tomato plant.

Another cute, baby tomato.

I think these are our Better Boy and Early Girl plants, but I'm not sure which is which. We also have a Roma and a Grape tomato plant, which are on the other end of our clothes line.

This is our kitty, Morgan. We adopted her last June from a vet clinic in a nearby town. She is so sweet. She will let Nathaniel pick her up and pack her around, and you'll still hear her purring. She is one of the most affectionate cats I've ever seen. She gets along well with the dogs, too.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we have some unique neighbors. They don't make a lot of noise, don't have loud parties, they never have loud shouting matches and they stay in their own space, for the most part. Oh, yes, they are cows. There are probably 15 cows, maybe 10 calves and 1 big bull named Midnight. Usually you don't keep a bull in the same pasture with calves, but this bull is very gentle. I've seen him laying down with a calf cuddled up next to him. I also saw a calf head-butt him once, and he didn't do anything but lay there. Here are some pictures of our neighbors.

This is one of the cows up on the hill behind our house.

This is one of the calves. She came up almost to the fence and stood there until I took her picture. Then she turned and wandered off.

This is the youngest calf, born in late April or early May. David and Nathaniel just missed seeing her birth. They got to see her when she was only a couple minutes old.

In other exciting news, I found a riding lawnmower for sale on Craigslist. We went and looked at it today, and although its at least 10 years old, needs a new ignition, a new seat & some carb work, we decided to buy it. The nice thing about the ad was that it was an "make me and offer" ad. So we low-balled it, offering the guy $100. And he took it! Then, he showed us the bagger that they had bought for the mower, but never used it. He said he was going to list it in a separate ad for $100, but he said that if we wanted it, we could have it for $25. So we decided to buy it, too. Richard thinks that we'll need maybe $100 in parts, if that. We looked up the bagger when we got home, and its selling online for $349.99. So I think we got a deal.

Have a great weekend!