My best friend will grow a bunch of starters from seeds and then share them around with everyone for their gardens. A few years ago I think we got three tomato plants from him. He contacted me a few weeks ago and asked how many we'd like this year, and I told him to give me all the tomatoes he can - put me last on the list and I'll take whatever's left over. I was kind of hoping we'd get ten or so plants - we have plans to build a bunch of good raised beds for next year, but we still have the kind of crappy raised bed from last year, and we could get about ten in there.
He showed up with sixty plants - tomatoes, peppers, squash, basil...
So Dawn and I spent all our spare time over the last couple of weeks (which wasn't much because we've been kind of buried beneath work and church commitments) clearing a spot and building the 2026 garden beds. I've moved four cubic yards (that's about three cubic meters for my metric friends, or two full-sized truckbeds-full) of redwood mulch. I have another two cubic yards sitting in my truck right now. This will finish up the bed nearest the camera in this pic and cover up the paper on the ground all around them. Then I need to put two to four yards of topsoil in the beds, then we can actually plant the plants which are currently living on my sun porch - hopefully all done next weekend. With them going in the ground so late I'm not if we'll actually get much produce, but hey, we're way ahead on our 2026 plan.
The GL-24 was around for the whole thing, and was helpful in digging a few redwood splinters out.