Small town moment #393

There are certainly smaller towns out there and it's not like Ohio is in the middle of nowhere, but I live in a small town.  Last census, I think our township finally went over 1000 people by a little bit.  There are no stop lights.  The center of town is a crossroads of two state routes with the tiniest of convenience stores on one corner, the township hall on another and two farms on the other two corners.  We don't have our own post office but instead our township is divvied up among the neighboring postal routes.  It is 15 miles one way to the nearest WalMart.  The closest grocery store is a little over 6 miles away.  Not too bad actually, but much different than the large suburban community I grew up in.  I love living in a small town.  It's very rare indeed that I miss the lights and noise of the city.


Since we moved out here, Mike and I have had lots of small town moments and today was a perfect example.  Mike and some of our Amish employees had been working on transplanting plants all morning.  Around noon they happened to be back near the barns loading up more plants when our mailman Kenny pulled into the driveway.  Usually the only time he does that is when we have a package that we have to sign for.  When Mike walked up to the vehicle, Kenny handed Mike three six packs of started tomato plants.  Seems as though Kenny was delivering the mail on the next road over.  On that road about 4 miles from our farm is where our neighbor with the greenhouse lives and she is the one that starts the majority of our vegetable plants.  (Is it still considered a "neighbor" when they live 4 miles away?  Yes, out here it is.)  Well, Kenny saw these tomato plants sitting on the side of the road.  He got out to take a look and there was a tag on them that said "Mike".  He said he couldn't think of anyone else whose plants they could be and so he picked them up and brought them over to our farm which happened to be on the continuation of his route.  Yep they were our plants that had fallen off the wagon yesterday when Mike had been hauling some more of our plants from the neighbor's greenhouses to our farm.  And so we now have had tomato plants delivered to us via the postal carrier.  They looked just a little bit haggard from their rough trip to the farm, but not too bad considering.


Mike and his 2 person crew planted just under 5000 plants this morning.  I'll try to get some pictures of the progress put up in the next 2 or 3 days.