Shiny Cooking

Previously: How does your garden grow? 8-11-09 edition

What follows is a chronicle of a giant, weed-infested, blight-ridden, cool-summer-stricken garden. It seemed like overnight there were 3-foot weeds in there. And that annoying fungus had killed the cukes and melons near dead.

I guess if the frost holds off til November, we might have tomatoes. That’s a joke, because it usually frosts here by the end of September. Sigh.

Let’s take a tour of the post-apocalyptic mess that is my garden, shall we? What you see above is one of the very few plants that looks normal or, nay, even healthy. Herbs are tough little guys. Including parsley.

The long view. Long garden is long. Yes, it’s a triangle. Those tall things in the back? Tomatoes. For reference, those yellow and orange spots in front of them are 3-foot-tall marigolds.

tomatoes and marigolds and weeds, oh my

This was the compost end of the garden last year. You can tell by all the tomato plants. They’re rogues. They came up by themselves. They do what they want and they don’t answer to anybody.

They also smoke and loiter outside the high school in their tomato-leather jackets.

A closer look at tomato alley. Those plants are taller than I am, nearing 6 feet.

Too bad tomato alley has yielded only 4 ripe tomatoes so far. These opalka plums will probably never ripen before frost.  The Fonzie tomatoes, on the other hand, have been giving up lots of nice ripe guys. None of them are pink brandywines though, and those are the tomatoes I’ve been waiting nearly 2 years for.

there has to be some good news, no?

The second crop of beets is lookin’ pretty fine. The first crop was lookin’ pretty anemic. Hope I get enough to make pickled beets. Mmm, pickled beets. (Insert Homer Simpson drool here.) Also hope they don’t get bit by all that nasty blight you see on the cukes and melon in the background.

The leeks are coming along too. Look ma, no blight!

The cabbages all got nibbled by bunnies when they were babies. So they’re kind of late, too. Gee, just like everything else. Something else is nibbling on them now, but just the leaves. I’ve decided it’s pretty and to name the effect “lacy.” To decide otherwise would be futile.

Herbs always seem happy and bug-free. Maybe I should just do an herb garden. A giant herb garden.

holy crap, don’t you ever weed?

Why no, no I don’t.

Nearly half the carrots are pulled out. I should put that pea-support fencing away I think. What? Peas have only been done like a month.

I know this was in the last garden update, too. Marigolds and dill, together at last. Just like nuts and gum. The dill heads have gone to seed and are drying. Is this where a Simon and Garfunkel song starts to play?

Oh gods. More stuff to do. Those 2 rows of onions on the left, see them? All the ones whose tops have fallen over? That’s a secret message. It means, “PULL ME OUT NOW AND SET ME OUT TO CURE IF YOU WANT TO HAVE ANY HOPE OF ME KEEPING TIL WINTER.” The row on the right? Way, way, way overgrown green bunching onions.

I still like them anyway.

The west end of the garden, looking south. Apparently I’ve also been too lazy to remove the orange “SEEDS ARE HERE, IDIOT, QUIT STEPPING ON ME” flags. This part looks good because I spent a few afternoons crawling the hell around there pulling goddamn weeds.

I am not bitter about this.

The zucchini look pretty good, still. Shocker.

How about some  fancy macro shots?

Probably the only swiss chard leaf in the garden without any holes in it. Must preserve this semi-perfection for posterity. And so I can pretend to people later that I didn’t have any bugs.

This little fella is about the size of a softball. He’s an Eden’s Gem melon. An heirloom I haven’t gotten to taste yet since the plant’s gotten blight both years I’ve tried it. I don’t think this one’s going to live long enough to ripen either.

Zomg! A red pepper is turning red! I heart you, pepper plants. You never get diseased and die like (glances at melons) some others I could name.

And we close with the joy and wonder of new life. A parsnip, just gotten its grown-up leaves.

Too bad it’s going to die before it gets big enough to make the part humans want to eat. I miscalculated the planting of them a tad. Just a tad.

What a depressing garden!

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