Holy Horticulture, Batman!

Here's my garden now. Those there, up front, are the tomato plants. I had to give up on raising my tomatoes from seed this year and just go buy these. Luckily they were on clearance or the price of each little plantling would have given me a stroke. THAT'S the last thing I need this summer, eh? Then there's a row of dud beans, then a row of half-duds and half-awesome beans. Then another row of tomatoes, of a different variety. Thanks, Dot and Jay for your cast-off tomato cages from last year. My dad laughed at how big they were when he saw them, but I feel that our little 'maters are doing them justice. Behind the second tomato-row are two rows of corn, with vigorous pole-beans climbing every stalk. And behind THAT you can see some extremely bushy beans. They are going crazy and this next couple weeks - hopefully - will see me canning some huge bean-harvests in my pressure cooker/canner. Thanks for that, Will and Jodi! You guys are great!

Then in this here picture you can see my poor sad little pea row, staked up with string and branch chunks right from our dead backyard trees. Then an enormous, bushy cucumber row. I plan to use that harvest to make little pickles, and maybe some big pickles. I got the gallon-size pickle chips from Sam's Club and the kids are kind of going crazy on them, so maybe I'll use my P-Chef crinkle cutter to do up some fancy old pickle chips. That's a big maybe. Anyway, beyond my little green garden stool you can see the king of the garden: my enormous, outrageous, novelty, competition-size pumpkin vines. Just vines, so far. With plenty of flowers. Every day that I can, I go out and poke around looking for a little gourd to appear but so far, it's just a bunch of flowers. Soon, little gourds, soon. You'll have to come soon in order to be ready and hilariously large by Fall. Then next to the big old pumpkin vines are some smaller but equally vigorous Butternut Squash vines. They have flowers too and no gourds. But it's just super-cool to have something growing so dang well in my garden, where nothing but rocks and debris were flourishing when we moved in.

Seriously, when we moved in, this was a nasty dump-hole. My mother-in-law came to help turn over the soil and get the garden ready, but first we had to move a box of busted-up mirror tiles, two of those concrete-based poles for mounting what? satellite dishes?, a long strip of galvanized flashing, lumber scraps, and literally TONS of landscaping rocks that were a couple inches deep under the deadish grass. I still have more of those to pick out for next year's optimistic, expanded garden. Plus all the stuff we un-buried while rock-picking, like lots of pennies, old batteries, matchbox cars, two bbq grates, some pavers, busted bricks, and more plywood scraps. And pens. Plenty of pens. And toys. Little mini toys.

So, thank goodness something good is happening in the garden, and hopefully lots of it will result in harvested vegetables. And none of the vegetables will be malignant!