Zabby, that sounds wonderful. I can just imagine the color on the platters. I'm betting that some of your guests will be amazed at the intensity of flavors from home-grown tomatoes.

Carol

Zabby, Congratulations! It's so fun that you're getting to add a little bit of your hobbies to the wedding and share that with your guests.

Becky

That sounds so cool!!!
We'll be waiting (not so patiently) for pictures!!!
When is the big day??

Deanna

Sounds wonderful! And congratulations!

Are you growing any nasturtiums? If you are, be sure to bring a containerful to the caterer along with the tomatoes and use them as a garnish to decorate the platter. It will look fantastic, and they are edible (kind of spicy-tasting.)

Susan

Hi Zabby! Long time no talk to! Congrats on the wedding. I knew you wouldn't wait for me LOL...and I guess my wife would throw a kink into that idea anyway :-)

I wish you a life of pure happiness!

And I think you incorporating your homegrown 'maters into the reception is way cool. Very neat idea.

Best wishes,

Duane

I think that's awesome! It may sound like a little thing as you say, but I would be equally excited! Very personal.

Congratulations on the upcoming wedding.

Ann

Zabby,

My congratulations to your lucky hubby-to-be!!! And best wishes to you!

Sure wish I could grow tomatoes here in Misery.

JohnT

Thanks, guys! I'll be thinking of y'all when I'm harvesting for the Big Day.

Susan, great idea about the nasturtiums! I don't actually have any nasturtiums this year, but I do have pansies. They were getting a little tired, but I gave them all a serious trim, and have been studiously watering them the last week or two, and the ones in part shade look like they might come back, so with luck I'll have som edible flowers by then....

Duane, shh, the folks on this forum don't know about us... LOL... Maybe in our next lives we can raise goats and plant fruit trees together....

jt, If you ever have a late-summer or early-fall wedding, I promise I'll send you a bushelful of 'maters.
(My fiance's witness --- who is an old female college friend of his, the "best ma'am" as we've been jokingly saying --- is coming up from Missouri and she says it's TOO DARNED HOT for ANYTHING there these days....)

Cheers,

Zabby

"Maybe in our next lives we can raise goats and plant fruit trees together...."

You're on kiddo!

Congrats again! I have always loved your spirit and kindness. Wishing you and your soul-mate happiness beyond compare!

Duane

Zabby, let me add my good wishes and congratulations and many hopes for a long and happy life with your husband.

Mmmm, the tomatoes sound good and I'm flattered, although I'll miss the wedding my salsa will be there to send my good thoughts!

Annie

Congratulations!

The aisles are chock full, the organist has warmed up the crowd with a couple polka tunes, the groom and guys stand waiting......Zabby is out in her garden tasting and comparing tomatoes. "Oops" she sez, and comes in, at a dead run, with a big blot of tomato seed on the veil, and a half eaten heirloom in one hand. "Here, hold this"

Oh Zabby! Congratulations -- both on the wedding and on the tomatoes! I love the idea of having your own tomatoes at the wedding! My husband and I are huge blueberry fans, and served blueberry raspberry pies at our wedding -- they were pies we made from berries we had picked ourselves... And they were a huge hit!

Best wishes for many years of happiness and veggie eating!

Emily

We are still waiting for the pics!

Oh, gosh. Let her have a honeymoon first!

Carol

Nope. We NEED pics! :+)
You can't have a honeymoon when the garden is in full swing.

Hope everything went just perfectly, Zabby (new name here).

Deanna

Hmmmmm... what if... no tomatoes, no__________....

Congratulations Zabby! What a great idea to personalize your wedding. I bet you opened up some eyes to the wonders of home-grown tomatoes too.

Melissa

Congratulations, Zabby & DH! Hope you have many, many years of happiness.

Checking in to see how Zabby and new DH are doing. Looking forwarding to reading about the big event!

Becky

Congratulations Zabby. I guess this means you are not going to marry me. sob sob. Where will I ever find a tomato grower like you.

I am still waiting for my wedding invitation to arrive.

On your wedding day I hope to toast to you by having a big bite from the heirlooms in my garden and thinking about how I just missed marrying you.

I have to send you a couple of jars of my special Hot Annie's Salsa made with too many Habaneros. If your guests take a big bite of my salsa they will never forget your wedding. This stuff is really hot.

Remember all good Polish weddings need the best Kielbasi, Keeshka, Pierogi, Dumplings and fresh real fermented saurkraut. Nothing like a Polka band. I feel years younger already.

Wow my invitation just arrived. Look here it is.

Now for some good Polish food.

Come on everyone get up and dance. It is time for the

Beer Barrel Polka, also known as Roll Out the Barrel, is a song which became popular world-wide during World War II. The music was originally composed by the Czech musician Jarom Vejvoda in 1927. Eduard Ingris wrote the first arrangement of the famous song, after Vejvoda came upon the melody and sought Ingris' help in refining it. At that time, it was played without lyrics as Modøanská polka (Polka of Modøany). Its first text was written by Václav Zeman in 1934  Âkoda lásky (Wasted Love).

The polka became famous around the world. In 1938, Will Glahé sold one million copies of its German version Rosamunde. Shapiro Bernstein published the song under the name of "Beer Barrel Polka" a year later. The authors of the English lyrics were Lew Brown and Wladimir Timm. Meanwhile, the song was played also by many others such as Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller Orchestra, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. It later became a signature song of Liberace's. Since the 1970s, it has been played during the seventh inning stretch at Milwaukee Brewers baseball games.

During World War II, versions in many other languages were created and the song was popular among soldiers, regardless of their alliances. It was claimed many times that the song was written in the country where it had just become a hit. Its actual composer was not widely known until after the war.

A former Foreign Minister of Germany Hans-Dietrich Genscher even made a bet that it was a German song. He lost.

We did it!

Sorry, dukerdawg, but you and I will just have to wait till our next lives to run off together because BF & I went through with it (I guess that makes us now DH and I, which is going to take some getting used to!)

Thank you all SO much for the good wishes. I thought of you all often, especially when showing off my garden and my pantry to our many visitors, and when eating all the good local food we had that weekend, especially, of course, the wedding reception tomato salad --- and Annie's Salsa, which we served in copious quantities with tortilla chips at the BBQ the night before the wedding, and which of COURSE got lots of compliments.

It was a truly wonderful weekend. Things got a bit stressful, of course, in the final hours of the prep; there were a few hours on the Friday morning, when people kept showing up at the house unannounced, with the dog going nuts from all the excitement, and all I wanted was NINETY MINUTES uninterrupted to finish getting a few things ready and it seemed there was a worldwide conspiracy to prevent it.

But at about noon on Friday I just shifted from stressed planner into Happy Bride mode and let it happen. Because 95% of guests were from out of town, we wanted to maximize visiting time, so we had a casual barbecue on Friday night and a drop-in for coffee & muffins on the Sunday in addition to the ceremony Saturday afternoon (at the local Catholic church, where I'm a parishioner) followed by a buffet dinner at a simple but handsome local historic building.

The tone we aimed for in the whole thing was "simple but celebratory," and it felt like we pulled it off. We had lots of personal touches, and featured plenty of local food from various suppliers in our small town & agricultural region. And the best thing about getting married a bit later in life (we're past 40) is that we felt confident about doing it our way, working in any "traditions" that maded sense to us and cheerfully jettisoning any that didn't.

My huge family (30 or so people total) and DH's small one (Mom, brother, sister) got along well, people (about 100) from near and far, some of whom we hadn't seen for YEARS, descended, and after my months of planning, an AMAZING contingent of close friends & relatives took over the actual running of things and ALL the work during the actual weekend so we could concentrate on hosting our guests and getting married.

And the weather, an iffy proposition in this part of the world at ANY season, was PERFECT. Sunny and warm but not overly hot all three days of the weekend. (If it had rained or been cold the night of the barbecue I really had NO IDEA what we would have done squeezing everyone into our small house instead of our big yard!)

The photos on the Picasa site show
- 18 pounds of mixed heirloom tomatoes, picked a bit underripe on the Wednesday, per the caterer's instruction, and delivered to their kitchen (pretty much the last good picking I got -- lucky we weren't married a week later!)

- DH & me outside the church just before the ceremony

- the reception hall

- the tomato-bocconcini salad (with basil vinaigrette) as prepared by the caterers -- it was AMAZING, and they scattered the handful of leftover heirloom tomatoes around the buffet table

- the bride, well into the reception, enjoying about my third glass of local Baco Noir and a piece of cake. The shifty character in black beside me is one of my nephews, who despite his expression told me he had a great time (and I figure, if even an 11-year-old enjoyed the wedding, we must have done something right).

No honeymoon per se --- for us this fall, the special treat is to STAY HOME after a summer of running around. We've been putting the house back in order, recovering, and getting back to work (we are both self-employed). But we're hoping to take a little first-anniversary trip around this time next year as a sort of delayed honeymoon.

Thanks again to so many of you for taking an interest and sharing your good wishes.

Annie, if you can have half the fun at your wedding, whenever it may be, as I did at mine, you'll be a lucky woman indeed.

Zabby,
Honest Woman At Last

Here is a link that might be useful: zabby wedding photos

...I also stuck in a photo from the actual ceremony (so dukerdawg knows it's legit and all ;-) ).

For the record, we walked down the aisle together, hand in hand, singing with the whole congregation.

Z

Zabby, thank you so much for sharing those beautiful photos. The tomatoes are the least of it. I'm very happy for you and your DH. It sounds as if the wedding you planned was precisely right.

And may I say that is a lovely church. I can't imagine any place more perfect for the ceremony.

Carol

Zabby, Congratulations! Wishing you and the DH many happy years to come!

Becky

Zabby,

I'm so happy for you and your lucky husband! You were such a beautiful bride. Here's wishing you many years of wedded bliss! (and a great tomato harvest each and every year)

John

> Here's wishing you many years of wedded bliss! (and a great tomato harvest each and every year)

John, that may in fact be one of the secrets of wedded bliss, who knows? Certainly one of the best ways I know of keeping DH happy is to help keep him well fed....

;-)

Thanks, all, for the warm wishes. It was a wonderful wedding weekend and we plan to have many wonderful married decades of enjoying harvests together.

Z

Dear Zabby,
You even got married in a tomato-colored dress!
Lovely photos, thanks for sharing them!
I've been wondering how the wedding went and wanting to hear all about it. Sounds wonderful, a dream come true.
Congratulations!
Lpink

Congrats to you Zabby!! You are indeeed a beautiful bride. I wish you a long and happy life together filled with great love and of course...lots of tomatoes.

Beautiful!
You, DH AND the tomatoes!!

May you harvest together for many seasons to come.

Thanks for sharing,
Deanna

Oh Zabby, that was just a wonderful wedding and I love the dress. I'm trying to tell my girls that I need emerald green, the color of pastures and fields. They think I should be "pastel". Pah. What do kids know?

I love the way you did just what you wanted and made your wedding your own. There's aplace for tradition, I suppose, but we should all make our own traditions as we feel comfortable doing.

Congratulations on a perfect wedding, a wonderful start for the rest of your life together and all my best wishes for good harvests and sunny skies the rest of your life.

Annie

P.S. Elery thinks we should write our own vows. I wonder if "you're only second in my heart to my horse" is appropriate. (grin) After all, he IS working on that number one spot.....

> I'm trying to tell my girls that I need emerald green, the color of pastures and fields. They think I should be "pastel". Pah. What do kids know?

That pastel thing does seem to be something we go through and grow out of. I guess it takes a real woman with a certain experience like thee and me to handle strong colours! Do you know, a jewel-like green was what I had originally in mind when I went fabric shopping before I fell for that red....

>> I love the way you did just what you wanted and made your wedding your own. There's aplace for tradition, I suppose, but we should all make our own traditions as we feel comfortable doing.

Indeed. And we did follow many traditions. But for us it was important to think about the origins of them --- why they got to be traditions and whose traditions they are. In many cases some things that people think of are long and important "traditions" turn out actually to be pretty recent, at least in the context of how long folks have been getting married!

(The white dress thing was started by Queen Victoria, for example. And the couple processing *together* as we did turns out to in fact to be a very old tradition; in fact, even the current official Catholic ritual (don't know about any other denominations) gives several options, NONE of which calls for the groom waiting at the altar while the bride's father "gives" her away.

But I LOVED exchanging rings --- the symbolism of eternity in the circle is lovely. And we had a unity candle, a lovely newer Catholic tradition.

We wanted a toast (who couldn't use all the good wishes anyone can offer them?) but R. doesn't like champagne that much and a good one was beyond our budget, so we toasted with the local apple cider, available in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions.

And so on.

>> Elery thinks we should write our own vows. I wonder if "you're only second in my heart to my horse" is appropriate. (grin) After all, he IS working on that number one spot.....

Hee, hee. Well, I think it is very good to keep him working on it! After all, he who is #2 tries harder. ;-)

Vows are one place where we surprised ourselves. I am a professional writer and editor, and assumed that of COURSE we would write our own vows. But as we looked at the standard Catholic version, we found that it said pretty much everything we wanted to say. So we did end up going with "tradition" there, though I have heard some very lovely and meaningful own-written vows, too.

We did draft a few words for when we exchanged rings, for which DH's first suggestion was [deep, menacing voice] "I have you now, bwah hah hah hah." I think he was a bit startled when I called his bluff and started to write that down.... ;-)

I know you will do things just right for YOU, when the time is right. (Wondering if you can involve the backhoe somehow....?) ;-)

Zabby