Little Growing Things

I definitely have some little growing things in the garden. And yet I still am in that period when I have put a lot of time, energy, and sweat into the garden, and it is really just teasing me with the promise of a bountiful harvest. Yes, there have been some radishes, and arugula, and lettuce, and just in the past few days some sugar snap peas and spring onions. But I still need to buy a lot of vegetables at the store. That is really the test, for me. Being able to go and harvest something for dinner, planned menus be damned.

My garden is a little different this year than in the past. More eggplant and peppers, no rapini and not so many salad greens. And somehow I have ended up with nine tomato plants, which is an all time high. It would take really terrible luck (or some really pernicious pests) to strike out in the tomato department this year.

It is always interesting to see what comes up on its own. This year I have tons of fennel, a lone cucumber, and three sturdy potato plants (Yukon Gold, I think) that I reluctantly had to pull up, since they were just in the wrong place. My dad calls these plants "volunteers," which is a term that really appeals to me. I suppose that these plants are also little gifts from the previous year, and sometimes rather unexpected. I was frankly stunned to see the cucumber. My cucumbers were a disaster last year as usual, victims of my reluctance to use chemicals. I picked only a few before the vines succumbed to some sort of virus that always seems to claim them. I don't even recall discarding a fully ripe fruit that might have yielded a seed that came up this year. I suppose that I'll just have to wait a few weeks to find out if it is the same variety that I tried to grow last year.

Well, time to go check on dinner.