Wild Garden

I hope you're enjoying these little bite-sized blog posts. It's pretty much all that I can manage right now. There is so much going on and if I shared it all, these posts would be novellas, and none of it would make any sense. Well, less sense than they already do. 

I haven't written much about my garden this year, and I usually fill the pages here with all sorts of garden-related content. I went away in the middle of July for two weeks and returned home to some depressing plant news. My Duke of Tuscany jasmine sambac was DOA because no one bothered to water him. Also, my magical Mexican plant that smelled like licorice was a withered corpse; again, no one watered him. And my wee henbane kicked the bucket too. You guessed it, no water. The grasshoppers are horrible this year and the tiny ones have taken to eating the new leaves on my tomato plants. I go out at night with a headlamp on (yes, I'm that kind of weird gardener) and a pair of shears and snip in half as many as I can find. I was happy to find a whole family of lizards nestled in between the grow bags against the fence, so I do have some pest control allies. And some praying mantises. And spiders. Oh, and my horseradish is dead too. Yep, no H2O. The rest of the garden looked anemic, including the tuberose, which should be blooming by now but are not. I don't know what kind of watering these people did while I was away, but I assure you, it was not how I water. Within a few days of being home and getting on a regular watering schedule, the plants that did survive began to look normal again. Next year we're putting in a drip system as this leaving it up to the will of others just isn't working. 

Finally got enough tomatoes to do something with. Twenty-two tomato plants, two indeterminates, and 10 or 12 Romas, a few heirlooms, one yellow cherry, and a Brandywine seemed to do the trick with the output. It's hot now so some of them have stopped blooming, but with the help of some growth nutrients to get those leaves back on, and then some blooming nutrients, some of them should produce until October. The yellow squash has just about run their course. The zucchini is still promising, and cucumbers are finally coming on. The beans were pulled yesterday, another victim of raindrop watering (this is when the lazy folk just hold the hose with the shower fixture on and piddle on the plants for about a minute), but they had produced enough that I can reuse the seeds for next year. 

The volunteer pumpkins have gone absolutely mad! They are everywhere! And they're putting off a few pumpkins. We got one watermelon that was left on the plant too long, so it had become a little bit grainy, but again, seeds. So, all in all, I'd say the food garden is successfully living up to its potential. The perfumery and medicinal plants were neglected.