Gardening in the Ozarks

Me and Ames (My beautiful wife, her name is Amy but I like calling her Ames). We have been blessed with a wonderful garden each year. We have cucumbers,  strawberries,  zucchini, dill, among other things but the tomatoes are something that you just have to taste to believe the flavor,  Homegrown is always better than the greenhouse tomatoes you get at most of the supermarket's and restaurant's. But the tomatoes grown in the Ozarks have a whole different flavor,  it comes from the rocky, but very rich black dirt that forms on our north and east slopes of our hills, they also grew strawberries and tobacco.  I will talk about that later along with our trade and money here from the old days. My uncle told me when he was at driving age he would load up the first batch of homegrown tomatoes and drive to Wichita kansas to sell them. He said they would always go fast and people wanted more. People here picked tomatoes for a living when they where in season.  I was told that a 40lb tomato create payed 10 cents to pick and it went to the local canning factories,   and a 25lb basket was  called a half bushel payed 25 cents, but the half bushel only was the very best of the tomatoes that was sold to the markets. You could make more money with the 40lb create because you could pick them faster and  they went to the local canning factories that was then shipped all over. They grew tomatoes named Sioux,  that came from the Sioux Indian. (I have found some seeds of the on a web site called tomatoe fest out of Oklahoma,  so we planted some and can't wait to try them).  If you visit the beautiful hills of the Ozarks make sure you stop by a farmers market or a local stand and taste the blessing of the fruits that God has blessed us with.