Poor Vince! He Tried!

For a couple of years, we grew tomatoes in some self water setup with 5 gallon buckets. He had installed cattle panels with buckets on both sides and I could tie the tomatoes up to the wires. We’ve changed our plans and now I grow tomatoes in mineral tubs (from a friend who has cows). While planting everything this year, I ran out of tubs, filled all the raised beds and still hadn’t planted basil. It will do fine in a medium size pot but I saw all those 5 gallon buckets sitting there empty and planted basil in 9 of them, parsley in three and dill in two. There were some bamboo looking weeds growing between most, but not all of the pots. I planted the basil in the pots that had shade from the tall weeds. Several times I’ve gone out and trimmed the weeds so they were’t shading the basil too much and it was doing great – loving the afternoon shade and not caring that it came from weeds.

Vince has been out working in the back yard. He’s done a great job of cleaning up a corner that was getting out of control and cutting the weeds in a small part of “garden area” on a retaining wall that I am afraid to try to cut with my bad knee. Then he said “I cut all those weeds by the 5 gallon buckets.” Oh, no! The shade for the basil – gone! He had just told me he was done working for the day. I said “Can you please help me move that basil? I had left those weeds there to shade it from the afternoon sun.

I couldn’t start to pick up a 5 gallon bucket full of wet soil so moved all the basil pots over to a shady spot. He felt bad for having cut the shade but there was no way to know those weeds were being used for some good purpose. The basil is better where it is now and it looks so much better with all those tall weeds gone.

And while I was messing with the basil, I picked enough for this afternoon’s dinner and for tomorrow’s dinner.