Suckers

I've been spending time with the tomato plants that are in the backyard - they are James' actually. You see a few weeks back we each chose something to plant in the garden and have since been watching them grow. Chase's strawberries have been fruitful, and my dill delightful (the carrots, not so much).

James tomatoes are green and growing and take a lot of work. Every few days I remove the suckers. (A sucker is just a young leaf/stem that develops between two tomato stems and a mature leaf - right in the v. If you allow a sucker to grow, it will eventually produce fruit, but it will reduce the size of fruit on the vine above it because it intercepts nutrients coming up from the roots.)

As I snap off those selfish suckers I release the smell of summer, but can't help but think about the process. And, as always, the metaphor jumps out at me...the need to prune the things out of our lives that suck too much energy. The unimportant things that sometimes seem so important.