— Teresa Bloomingdale
...the grass actually IS greener on the other side, but it's only because of the bodies buried there.
— Robert Ford
Even if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, keep to your own side; it's where you belong. There you can plant your own grass and tend to it.
― Richelle E. Goodrich
Every time I’ve mentioned my garden in the last few weeks, the words “sad” and “pathetic” come up. I figured it was finally time to show the world I’m not kidding. I actually have two raised vegetable gardens. This is the first one:
Those spindly leaves sticking up on the front left are my beet crop, such as it is. Don’t be fooled by the leaves hiding behind the asparagus, those aren’t beets. A little less than half the row survived, thanks to the squirrels.
Directly behind the beets was a row of spinach, which came and went so quickly I didn’t have time to pick any. I put up a low, plastic fence to separate the spinach from the bush beans, which were really slow coming on but I still don’t need to pick them more than once a week. And behind the beans is asparagus, which my neighbor planted for me last year.
*sigh* I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but this asparagus is the bane of my existence. It takes up a lot of space in my tiny garden, and I can’t even start harvesting it until next year. While it was kind of my neighbor to share, I could wish there was someplace else to put it.
This is my second garden:
Notice how once again the asparagus is dominating everything again? Oh, and she also planted the rhubarb that took over the right side of my tiny plot. This picture was taken after I’d pulled over half of it. I still have rhubarb in my freezer from last year (given to me by the same neighbor when she was harvesting). I really don’t need more.
On the left hand side are my sweet peppers, which started out doing really well but then they stalled and haven’t done much since. Between them and the rhubarb in the front is my lettuce. I tried using one of those seed strips for my lettuce, and although it got off to a really slow start, once it started growing it grew faster than we could use it, which is why it’s gone to seed. In front of that though, is a row of lettuce from a different kind of seed – it’s got a slight reddish tint to it.
Behind the lettuce is what passes for my tomatoes. The plants have not done well (I blame the asparagus) and if you look carefully you can see I have a single green tomato on the vine. It may interest you to know that the pepper plants and the tomato vines came from my neighbor. Curious about her garden?
This is a glimpse of (some) of her tomatoes on the left, peppers in the middle, and you can just see her bumper crop of hot peppers on the bottom right. The vines on the left are cucumbers.
A closeup of her bumper crop:
Here’s cucumbers in the foreground, with beans on the left, and more tomatoes on the right.
Here’s the view from my side of the fence:
That’s pole beans on the left and cucumbers on the right. Her rule has always been that what comes through the fence is mine. In past years I’ve been out there every day picking beans, and she used to grow butternut squash against the fence so I’d get several of those. This year it was cucumbers. *sigh*
Cucumbers are okay, but a steady diet of them can be a little much. She normally has a bumper crop – I have no idea why she plants so many when she has such trouble getting rid of them. A couple of weeks ago her husband came to our door to let me know I had cucumbers that needed picking. There were four of them. One of which was 18 inches long. I still have three of these monsters in my fridge.
Which brings me to my final picture. A couple of times in the past a squash will start developing close to the fence which creates an odd shape to it. I have no idea what happened with this cucumber.
I wonder which side of the fence it belongs to?
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