This Picture Is Worth at Least TWO Thousand Words

I think this photo tells you more about my husband than anything I could ever write. This is how he spent his afternoon yesterday. And I'm not supposed to tell you that the beer he's holding is a Corona Light. How can a man spend all afternoon cutting and loading scrap metal, and then come home and drink light beer? And here we all were thinking he was so macho.

But enough about him--don't you want to know what I was doing yesterday? Of course you do!

I was planting a field of potatoes. Yes, a field. That's what we're calling it anyway, because there are a LOT of potatoes out in that there garden, all the holes for which were individually hand-dug by me and the MiL. I can't lift my arms now, but I'll forget the pain in a couple of months when we're harvesting our fabulous potato crop. It's going to be meat and potatoes for us all winter.

We also planted some corn and lettuce, and in about an hour I'll plant beets. The beet seeds are soaking right now, in "bathtub-warm water." That's exactly what the seed packet directions said. What the hell is that? Everyone likes their baths at different temperatures, Seed People! Could you be a little more specific, please? I finally, and totally arbitrarily, decided that it meant water that won't scald a baby, so I went with kind of lukewarm. Which, incidentally, is usually about the temperature of our bath water in the winter. But if my beets don't germinate, I'm blaming the copywriters at John Scheeper's Kitchen Garden Seeds.