Summer of 2024

 As I have mentioned before numerous times, my wife and I live in East Tennessee and have been living here for over thirty years.  

While this area may not be like Atlanta, GA; NYC, NY; Chicago, IL, or Dallas, TX, it does provide many amenities available to most lifestyles and most financial brackets.

There are million-dollar homes and $200,000 homes, there lakes and parks, shopping areas, entertainment, gambling casinos, NASCAR, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and plenty of land for homeowners to have vegetable gardens.

My wife and I have had a vegetable garden every summer that has in the past included:  corn, potatoes, lettuce, squash, zucchini, carrots, bell peppers, cucumbers, melons, and several kinds of tomatoes.

You can buy fresh vegetables at a grocery store or at a farmer's market, but you still have to pay for the veges and the cost is substantially less if you grow them yourselves including their original price, insecticides, and fertilizers.  

My wife makes up her own nontoxic insecticides and we purchase a box of miracle grow which lasts us all summer.

In addition to eating our own veges, we freeze what we cannot eat for consumption in the winter months.  So far, we have frozen enough squash and zucchini to have two meals a week for three months.

Because of the early high temps, our garden has not produced what it has produced in previous years.  When the temps dropped a few degrees, our plants started producing normally again.

Every summer is always different but as we grow older, we find that our bodies have become fonder of warm/hot weather to cold/freezing weather.