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Here is a picture of our tomatoes. They are coming along nicely. So far, we’ve had enough of the full-size tomatoes (Jetstar) to make a big Mozzarella Caprese and we’ve had enough of the cherry tomatoes (Sweet 100 and Sungold) for extensive snacking and a salad. It looks like we will soon be enjoying many, many more.
This is our third year of square foot gardening. Overall, we have been very successful with this method. But this is the first year we have had success with tomatoes.
What I learned the first year: If you strip all the branches and leaves off your tomato plant, it will not do well. It needs those leaves!*
What I learned the second year: If you strip off all the little branches before they have a chance to blossom you will not grow any tomatoes.
What I learned this year: If I have Pdad decide which “branches” are suckers that need to be removed (as opposed to those which are actually leaves and tomato bearing arms), I will end up with many more tomatoes. Apparently, it is best for me to stick to watering, not pruning.
In addition to watering them and making Pdad the designated pruner, I did do a couple of things right vis a vis the tomatoes this year. Instead of buying the large Early Girl tomato plants at Costco (that we haven’t had much luck with) I bought cheaper tiny ones at the local nursery. My theory was that maybe tomatoes are like trees–better able to handle transplant shock when small. Also, I planted them laying down so that only the very tops poked out of the soil. This is supposed to get you a vigorous root system. What it got me was depressed. I kept comparing my plants to other people’s and they were pathetically small. Pdad (who has no acquaintance with depression or despair) stopped me from ripping them out. Now they are bearing nicely. We make a good team.
* I have been almost as pathetically stupid about this as this makes it sound. In my defense, let me explain for those who don’t know that Mel Bartholomew (the Square Foot Gardening Guru) recommends training your tomatoes to a single stem so that you can grow them in a smaller space. It turns out that I am simply incapable of understanding (or is it correctly implementing?) his instructions on which pieces of the plant to remove.
Robin asked what I think of mandatory health insurance. My reply was so lengthy that I decided to copy it here.
Mandatory health insurance is important.
1) All of us who have health insurance and all of us who seek treatment at the hospital are subsidizing those who do not have insurance–regardless of whether they’ve chosen to spend their money on other things or if they simply couldn’t afford it. We aren’t talking about pennies. This is subsidy on a grand scale. However, it isn’t a logical and carefully targeted subsidy. (If I end up in the hospital this year and you don’t, does it make sense that I should take a greater share of subsidizing the insuranceless than you should, just because you happened to avoid the hospital this year? No.)
2) We should provide a basic level of health care for everyone. It is a shame for a nation with the resources ours has not to provide a basic level of health care for its people. Without health, it is difficult to pursue happiness and it is also difficult to contribute to society.
3) If we do provide basic health care to everyone, then everyone should help bear the costs. No young, “I feel immortal,” risk-taking freeloaders allowed. Because the fact is, we don’t want to leave even young and stupid, risk-taking freeloaders to suffer, taking their potential with them, if a basic level of health care could allow us to avoid that.
4) Therefore, if we continue under the current insurance-based system (as it now seems obvious we will) everyone should be required to carry insurance. Unfortunately, we will have to figure out how to help many people pay for this, because we can’t require insurance if it means people end up going without their groceries to pay for it. But how to pay for those more explicit subsidies is another bucket of worms . . .
Other recent C&G posts about health care:
American Health Care (the comments are worth reading also)
Sketchy Thoughts on Health Care
Did you write your senators and congressperson yet?
Don’t put it off. It is fun and the health care issue is worth it. Start by finding out what your representatives believe about health care already. Just google the name of your senator or the name of your state and the word “senator.” The official websites will pop right up. Usually, there is an “issues” tab. Read all about it! What is your man or woman in Washington up to? What does he or she have to say about health care? Do you agree or disagree? Or do you need to learn more before you can decide?
My congressperson is, in my humble opinion, a conservative loon. And I say this as a person who is in many respects conservative (true, despite my surprising advocacy for single payer health care). I wrote to ask him why health care wasn’t even listed as one of the issues on his website. I had to recheck that just now to make sure it was true. Yep, no health care under the issues tab. Wow. So I sent him an e-mail asking him why it isn’t there. No response so far. But my conscience felt unburdened. I gave him some reasons why a conservative ought to support health care reform (see this article on why health insurance should not be tied to employment). I let him know that amongst his conservative constituency, there are plenty of us who care about health care and would like him to tune in.
The importance of health care is difficult to overstate. Lives, health, happiness, the budget, and our children’s future is at stake. Even though I don’t delude myself in thinking that a stray e-mail will change a senator or congressperson’s vote, I still want to be counted. I want my representatives to know the views of the people they represent, including me. I want them to know that their citizen constituency is paying attention. Lobbyists have their place. But it is wrong if the only people our representatives hear from are AMA, health insurance industry and pharmaceutical lobbyists. They need to hear from us too. If it makes sense to vote, it makes sense to spend 5 minutes e-mailing your representative. Do it now!
I am suffering from brain block. My brain block started with the desire to write something super comprehensive and well-informed about health care. But that isn’t possible right now.
So instead, here is what I’ve figured out so far: a) I support a public plan (But it does matter what the details are. There are a lot of ways a public plan could go wrong and then it would be worse to have one than not to have one) for exactly the reason its enemies are against it. A public plan could get us closer to single payer.
Unfortunately, a public plan is probably off the table, politically speaking. Single Payer (my true ideal) is definitely off the table. (If single payer scares you, consider that–as others have pointed out–Medicare, for all its warts and it has them!, is a public plan where the government is the single payer. Consider where our elderly population was before Medicare. Do you want to rewind? I don’t.)
So–
Despite current political realities (single payer and public plan being on hold), I still believe we must do something about health care and soon. But if the number crunchers who studied the plan currently on the table in Congress are trustworthy, and there really is no cost savings (!) from the plan they’ve been considering, then we can’t go with that plan. No cost savings = disaster. We can’t move forward until we figure out how to pay for this. We need to cut health care costs and find additional sources of revenue to pay for it.
I’m not sure what we should do instead of what is currently on the table given that there is no public appetite for the best fixes. The health care coops might work–depending on the details, of course.
So, I am still reading and thinking about health care and probably will be for a long time.
Health Care Reading Recommendation: I found the material on health care at FreshThinking.org super helpful. I especially appreciated their links to the articles on Why Tie Health Insurance to a Job? in the Wall Street Journal and the article in the Washington Post on the 5 Myths about our Ailing Health Care System.