These were store-bought tomatoes at the point when they were going to deteriorate, and they'd probably already been in a fridge. My garden tomatoes don't go into the fridge until they absolutely have to, and I then try very soon to process them (canning or freezing).

I regularly share garden produce, and my former next door neighbor called one day to see if I had some tomatoes. I'd given her a bad time about buying some the week before, when the garden was going great guns. I was getting ready to can and she laughed when she walked into my kitchen and saw every flat surface covered with a layer of boxes and bowls of these ripe tomatoes.

The work is underway in the yard, and we have a wind advisory all day today as a cold front moves in. It won't be too cold to work out there, but it is going to take some of the pleasure out of the task. I realized pretty quickly that standing around watching isn't helping, it kind of cramps their style, and though I brought an offered-and-accepted array of shovels (they had their own, but you can never have too many when it comes to the specialty ones - trowels, short shovels, sharp shooters, etc.) and at one point some needed duct tape. For tomorrow: I'll have to replace a chunk of concrete in the path. That's easy enough with 2x4s edging and bags of quick concrete, but it means another step in the job.

I need to work on my self-assigned task for today, to rebuild my wheelbarrow with new handles. I think I'll move this activity into the greenhouse. That wind is a killer. And while I'm at it, I'll straighten out the greenhouse. Truth be told, gardeners are packrats, you can never have too many pots, etc, but I should probably get rid of some of the really lightweight stuff that occupies space but rarely gets reused. I'll need the wheelbarrow - I had visualized a tidy line of excavated dirt through the front yard, but there will be quite a bit of shoveling and shifting to do out there when they finish, and the refurbished wheelbarrow is instrumental in that. (I could buy a new wheelbarrow for probably twice what I paid for the new handles, but there is nothing wrong with the barrow itself and I hate the idea of throwing things away instead of repairing them.)