Milk & Wine.... and Tomatoes

Milk & Wine Lillies, that is. Hubs came home the other day with some gorgeous flowers in hand. One of our neighbours used to own a florist shop and grew them to sell at his shop (for a tidy price of about $8 per stem, I'm told). A google search tells me they're called Milk & Wine Lillies (maybe). He's recently retired and has a nice bounty of these fragrant gems so when hubs was stopping by to say hello, our kind neighbour hand him these beauties.

See all those wonderful tomatoes in the background of the second shot? I'm a tomato junky and they are a MUST in our garden. This year, hubs planted several yellow pear tomatoes from seed. We normally buy plants but hubs is keen to learn as much about successful gardening from seed and only one way to do that... just do it. If it fails, try again. We had such a poor start to summer, too much rain and certain our tomato crop would flop. Not quite. Initiallly, the plants grew like they were on steroids (we're strictly organic) but no flowers on the plants. Then came rains and hurricanes along with some flowers but the leaves started to wilt and turn to brown shriveled clumps. Amazingly, we got tomatoes, lots of them. One patch in the garden didn't get staked so the tomatoes grew along the ground and didn't seem to mind one bit. Our beefsteak tomatoes didn't thrive but our pear tomatoes, paste tomatoes and lemon boys did pretty good. My freezer will house our bounty and we'll enjoy some spicy spaghetti sauce during the upcoming cold months.

When hubs makes an awesome meal that looks great on the plate, I run for my camera. This was SO delicious, I just had to take a picture of it so I can run across it and remind hubs to make it again. The beef ribs are from the local butcher and their meat is growth hormone and antibiotic free.