I am especially proud of the cherry tomatoes which number 43  between 3 plants at last count.

I'm also going to put up a picture of the first things we harvested-- two cucumbers and a shishitou (kind of pepper).  We had two cucumber plants but we had lots of weird stuff on the leaves.  Some kind of mold.  We had lots of flowers but only got two cukes between two plants.  In the same planter, we had three pepper plants and two of the plants are pepper producers.  The third seems to just be hanging out.  No leaf problems with these  plants.

I also had ruccola but it went wild when we were away for two days, then it was suddenly covered with ants and aphids which fortunately didn't spread to the other plants. I tried picking/shaking the bugs off, then  I mixed baking soda, dishsoap and water (which I read about on the web) to spray the plants.  It helped a bit but I eventually just tossed the ruccola.

I like this photo because we could spell something in Japanese with our harvest.  

We would read it as "ichi no he" which would translate as "the first he".  He is a letter in the hiragana alphabet.  It doesn't really mean anything.  Just my search to find meaning from randomness.  And how many times does your food resemble a letter?

I tried growing some stuff by seed when I lived in Vancouver.  I grew sweetpeas, forget-me-nots and some other flower.  Only the sweetpeas grew to flowers.  The place I grew them was in the backyard of the basement suite I had rented.  There was a HUGE pile of sticks.  I got permission from the landlord to bundle them up for trash and plant stuff there.  I cleaned it up, turned the earth, planted seeds and watched and weeded.  Sadly, the only plant I could tell apart from a weed was the sweetpea.  So I ended up growing a bunch of beautiful sweetpeas and a few weeds.

It was interesting not only for growing plants but because I met a lot of my neighbors by doing yardwork.  The people next door thanked me because they said rats had been living in the pile.  Everyone who walked by always had a nice comment from the weather to my plants. 

When I was helping my brother in Calgary with his lawn I noticed the same phenomenon.  He already knew most of his neighbors but they still stopped for a quick chat if they were walking by.

None of my neighbors here really stop for a chat.  We have talked with each other on different occasions if we happened to meet outside.  I guess it's other people walking by who don't really say much.  I usually say hi or nod, though.