The garden has been, um, there. We’ve gotten some tomatoes, most of which went immediately into Chloe’s mouth. I picked two the other day. She pointed and whined, so I handed her one. She ate it like an apple, stem and all. She pointed to the other one. I destemmed that one and handed it over, and she ate it as well. She loves it when dinner includes a fine heirloom tomato, chopped up just for her. She doesn’t especially like the ones you get on sandwiches and burgers in restaurants, so clearly she inherited some good taste.

But yeah. Some tomatoes, some peppers–I finally grew Alma paprikas this year–some herbs, a couple of scallions, a few green beans before the teepee fell over. Three carrots and a solitary beet. A lot of raspberries and parsnips. There are probably still potatoes down there somewhere. But mostly, the garden is a wreck. This gardening-with-a-small-child idea is just not practicable, not for me. And next year is going to be even worse, because I’m doing it all over again next spring. 

So I’m closing down the garden. I’ve been slowly making last harvests and pulling down stakes, and I’m going to move the few herbs and flowers I really want to keep (the cannas I planted way back when have just started coming up; doesn’t that figure?). Then I’m going to pull everything down, cover it with compost and black plastic, and let it sleep for a year. It makes me sad to do, but looking at the weed-encrusted rotting shadow of what a garden should be makes me sad, too, and I’m just plain not going to have the time or energy–if I didn’t with one baby, I certainly won’t with two, and first-trimester symptoms are even worse this time than last.

So next year will be a year without a garden, even if we sell the house, which we’re still trying to do. I’ll grow a few things in pots; I think I can manage that much, and Chloe’s appetite demands at least one or two tomato plants. But otherwise I’m closing down shop.

Which means I’m closing down the blog, too. I may come back to it, if I feel like writing and feel I have something to write about, but I’m also working on other projects, and my energy is wearing thin these days, so for now, I’m putting it into hibernation with the garden. Good gardening, everyone! Plant a seed for me.

Big Boy. Better Boy. Early Girl. Beefsteak.

If you grow tomatoes at all, you probably recognize these as some of the most commonly available tomato plants available from nurseries every spring. They grow well; they’re easy to care for; and everyone grows them. This is partly because they’re what people know and grew up with, and partly because that’s all that’s available at nurseries. With the recent upswing in interest in gardening in general and heirloom tomatoes in particular, that’s changing somewhat; you might see a dozen, or maybe even two dozen, varieties available at any given nursery.

But there are literally hundreds of tomato varieties out there. Have you ever tried a Cosmonaut Volkov? A Persimmon? A Zapotec Pleated? If you haven’t planted them yourself, chances are you haven’t. And chances are you won’t find those varieties in a nursery, even if you find the better-known heirlooms (Brandywine, Purple Cherokee, and Mortgage Lifter, for example). The only way to even try to experience the wonderful range of tomato variety is to start them from seed.

Tomatoes are easy to grow from seed. A sunny windowsill, a bag of potting soil, and a few Jiffy or Dixie cups are all you need. Other vegetables are equally easy to grow from seed, and their marvelous varieties equally passed over. Take green beans, for example. Every gardener has seen Kentucky Wonders and Blue Lakes, and they’re great producers and great-tasting. But what about Trionfo Violettos, which are equally tasty, deep purple, and wildly productive (as well as much easier to see among the bean foliage)? Everyone has seen purple eggplant, but what about eggplant that’s white as a ghost, or apple green, or purple-and-pink striped?

Gardeners often buy plants from nurseries because they’re easy, hardy, and convenient. Growing your own takes more planning and a little more work. But it yields more interesting plants with different flavors and textures for less money, and it’s been part of gardening over the world and since cultivation began: saving seeds from the best plants, and growing new plants from them. Pick up a packet of seeds this spring: a tomato you’ve never heard of, an herb variety that intrigues you, a melon you can’t get at the grocery store or the farmer’s market. Plant them, and see what new worlds of taste and color open up before you. Grow diversity. Grow the world. Grow from seed.

(P.S. Hire me.)

So the tomatoes are producing, yes. Mostly the Amish Pastes and a smallish not-quite-cherry that I don’t know the name of. I don’t remember what I planted where, and I’ve given up trying. I have a couple of Alma Paprika peppers, one yellow and one pink, and some other unidentified peppers that I thought were jalapenos but aren’t, which was disappointing when I wanted to make salsa last night. (However, my mother-in-law can probably be convinced to part with some.) There are no beans yet, but lots of bean flowers. Likewise with the zucchini. (I planted them both late.) There is plentiful basil and sage, and beautiful raspberries and peaches. That’s about it, but I’m okay with it. At least I’m getting something. The days are hot and wet and full of mosquitoes, and the garden is, of course, full of weeds (though I did a quick emergency job on part of it when we had a house showing, and I’m trying to make time this week to go out with either boiling water or Round-Up to get more), and it’s the part of summer I really don’t like. Except for the eating part.

My weed escapade has kept the side garden relatively nice-looking, though the poor lemon sorrel is baking now that it’s not shaded from the heat by all the other overgrown plants and weeds. I was afraid of that. I need to get some mulch. The reporter who wrote the Blade piece on my garden offered me some, but I totally forgot to go and fetch it, and since she’s now invited me over three times and I haven’t gone, I kind of feel like I’ve flubbed my chance. We’re now on our third summer of a tight budget because of Eric being out of work, so I’m not overly eager to buy mulch, but I never am, and the poor garden needs it.

I am contemplating what to plant in the bare patches. More zucchini? Carrots, for the fall? Lettuce? It ought to be something. Of course, it should be something very low-maintenance.

On the plus side, the peaches on the tree are just about ripe. On the minus side, I didn’t remove nearly enough of them, so they’re all apricot-sized instead of peach-sized. Now I know how many is too many for a tree that size to support. How big a peach would a tree with just one peach on it grow? Unfortunately I don’t think anyone who owns a peach tree and likes peaches would be willing to find out.

I did tie up the tomatoes, discovering that one of the plants has almost no leaves and one has an almost-ripe tomato on it. Which is not unreasonable for July, but is kind of unreasonable for my first time tying them up. Yeah. Anyway, they’re up now, and should be doing better. I cleared away the weeds around them and some ones I missed from last time around the peppers and eggplants. I have one Alma paprika pepper growing now. The eggplant plants are small and spindly, but that’s not surprising considering how many weeds they were covered by. 

I decided that the potato patch is a bust. The plants were mostly gone anyway, and the rest covered with bindweed and this one annoying bush of the neighbor’s that keeps coming back, whether they cut it down or I do. (Of course I only cut the parts on my side of the fence.) The onion sets had done their best in the same conditions, but were clearly too tired to struggle on, so I pulled them up. The leeks had disappeared.  

On the other side of the garden, where those beans were supposed to have grown, is now my de facto potato patch, because I planted some there…last year? No, the year before; last year was garlic. Anyway, they came back, and I didn’t pull them out, and there are enough that I might as well leave them, because I’m not getting anything else out of that entire side of the garden.  

So that’s the vegetable garden: tomatoes doing okay, peppers and eggplants behind, volunteer potatoes, and an insanely happy patch of parsnips, some of which think they’re going to flower but they’re sadly mistaken. There will be no more flowering parsnips in my garden, possibly ever.  

Then I moved onto the herb garden. This, too, was choked with weeds, but only in specific places, and was surprisingly easy to clean up. I pulled out approximately 381 volunteer tomato plants. I left one. I know they’re cherries, which I’m not too excited about, but they freeze really well f0r winter cooking and there’s nothing else in that part of the garden anyway. (There’s a theme emerging here.) The two other denizens of that area are leftover candy onions from last year that have flowered: 

 And wild onions that Mom transplanted there in April from the driveway and have also flowered: 

I’m not too keen on wild onion–they’re kind of tough–but they do grow easily and the look of the seed head may be enough to convince me that they’re worth keeping. How cool is that? They’re Muppet onions!  

The peas are gone; the lettuce is gone; the rocket is gone (well, not gone, but flush with seed pods and intensely bitter). The lemon sorrel, surprisingly, is still doing okay. Maybe it grew too slowly and was choked down by the mass of everything else. It’s now almost all that’s left in the greens bed, that and the kale and a few brassicas.  

On the good side, everything looks lovely now that the weeds are gone (except the ones in the path, and I’m starting to think that it’s Round-Up time for them because they’re the low-lying ones that are impossible to grab in impacted dirt, and that’s the side near the house so I don’t have food plants over there anyway, and…you get my drift). And the new beans and zucchini and basil are doing well. And the sage is very, very happy.  

I put some peas in my pocket for saving for seed–because it never hurts–and cut a bunch of oregano to dry, and laid it on my garden bag. I stood up, and contemplated the raspberries that I thought I had cut down last year. 

Then Eric tapped on the window and indicated that Chloe needed feeding, so I went in. She was kind of scared of me, and I figured it might be because I stank, so I showered and then fed her (she’d had a snack in the meantime but was still much happier with me when I smelled like Mommy and not so much like Dirty Tomato-Streaked Sweat) and we worked on dinner and then it started storming, and I didn’t remember until this morning that my bag was still out there. It’s on the porch now, drying. The oregano should be fine. I don’t know about the seeds that were tucked into the pockets. Chalk up one more casualty to my Weed Once a Year policy. 

Nevertheless, the beans are finally going, but slow. My supervisor at work has offered me the leftovers from his garden, which is awesome, but not the same as having my own. (It’s surprising how many of my coworkers get the daily paper. Now everyone knows (a) I’m a vegetable gardener and (b) I have the cutest baby possible. Tahree, the reporter who wrote the article, says that a bunch of people have gotten in touch with her about being in the series in the last couple of days. She attributes it to the cuteness of my baby. I think that’s fair.) Especially since I haven’t gotten any dry beans planted this year. Except, that is, for two.

Last year I had a sort of monolith in the garden, each side a different bean. I had Trionfo Violetto and Hidatsa Shield Figure and Cherokee Trail of Tears (very thick-skinned, by the by, or at least those ones were) and Italian Rose. The Italian Roses are bush shelling beans, and I never actually ate any, but I found a few for seed and brought them inside with the Hidatsas and Cherokees. Then I didn’t have any place to put them, and was too lazy to get out my seed container, so I left them on the counter. A few were swept up when I cleaned, a few were lost, and I was left with two, which I had no place for.

So one day, clearing off the counter (finally), I tossed them into the little four-inch pot on the windowsill where the Mother of Millions babies are. Later, I watered. The beans sprouted. And grew. And kept growing, because why not? It’s a sunny window with space to climb (though I actually broke off the tips after they started doubling up and looking scraggly) and adequate water. They hooked over the screen latch and the curtains. They flowered. And now? Small beans are growing on my windowsill.

This is probably the only way I was ever going to taste a shelling bean this year. If these plants keep going, this may be the greatest discovery since basil. Fresh beans! On the windowsill! In a tiny pot! With no mosquitos or 97 degree heat involved! I may have to do this every year.

Check it out.

(Actually, it’s Chloe who’s famous. She’s the reason I got into the feature.)

I’d promised to be back there only long enough to tie up my tomatoes, on account of we were headed for AAA to pick up Eric’s car before they closed and then go to dinner. But when I got back there and saw the result of my neglect, all thoughts of dinner went out the window. Now that I’ve had experience in motherhood, I think I can say that gardening is a lot like it. Specifically, full of guilt. I feel bad when I’m not with Chloe and I feel bad when I’m with her for the things I’m not doing. I feel bad for neglecting my garden and I feel bad for the time I spend on it because it’s time Eric has to spend watching Chloe, and now that he’s home for the summer and watching her full-time he doesn’t get much alone time and I know he’d like me to provide some. But she can’t go back with me in the jungle. There are parsnips growing wild everywhere, and tomatoes trailing on the ground–not anymore, or at least not some;  I only tied up a few before Eric dragged me away because I was busy clearing away the weeds from the poor half-smothered peppers and eggplants, yanking out flowering thistles and threatening-looking pokeweed, swearing roundly at the bindweed and trying to calculate whether the black plastic sheeting I got is going to cover everything. The garden needs to be put down for  the summer, at least the part that keeps killing the plants I put into it. In the fall when the weeds are dead, I’ll figure things out.

I say this all the time. I do keep meaning to get my act together. But Chloe and Eric come first, and since I know I can get at least some food out of a garden mostly neglected, un-neglecting the garden is unfortunately low on my list. But I do need to do some work. Eric can watch Chloe a little more. And the beans and zucchini I planted in the herb garden are actually coming up, unlike everything I put in the vegetable garden, so I’ve got poles to transfer and greens to pull before they seed and oregano to harvest. Eventually I’ll figure out a balance between my garden and the rest of my life. Until then, I’ll keep making plans and seeing how spectacularly I fail at them. I’ve got tomatoes, anyway.

This is exactly how raspberries should be eaten. We had a patch when I was growing up, and Dad would send my brother and me outside with a four-quart bowl. “Pick raspberries,” he said. “Watch out for the bees.” We watched. We picked. We filled up the bowl, besides eating some ourselves. That’s what raspberry picking should be like: bounteous plenty, with a red-stained mouth, and the prospect of more every day. The state of almost being tired of raspberries, only you can’t because they’re raspberries. I’m so glad my raspberries are finally grown up the way they’re supposed to be, and I’m so glad I’m sharing it with Chloe, even if she’s too young to remember right now. Wherever we live, we’ll have raspberry patches just like this.

So, an update. The tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and leeks are in the garden. The melons and squash and cucumbers are not. The basil and parsley and celery and chamomile and cilantro and savory are in the herb garden. The parsley disappeared the day after I planted it, so completely that I wondered if I had really planted it or just thought I did. But it was right by the chamomile and the chamomile’s still there. What would make parsley disappear? I don’t know. But I need to replant it. I also need to replant carrots; it’s getting awfully late but there are only two or three in what is now the parsnip bed, and carrots are important. And plant beans and corn. And weed, always weed.

I’ve also got a lot of empty space where I got rid of the lemon balm and wormwood (because the lemon balm drops baby balms all over the garden, and the wormwood exploded into five-foot-tall behemoths for flowering, which is a shame since it was so pretty and tame the first year). I think it’s time to take a trip to a nursery for some plants to fill in.

And last night a photographer from the Toledo Blade came by to take a picture of Chloe and me in the garden. I’m going to be part of a series on local gardeners, and I’m representing the “mom with young children” gardener demographic, so Chloe was my prop. Or maybe I was hers. She hasn’t been particularly cooperative with my camera, but she loved the photographer’s and was very cooperative, and of course extremely cute.

After the photographer left I went back to the garden to get some things for my first garden food of the year. This year it was komatsuna and chives. Chloe likes chives, it turns out. Definitely my daughter. I used them both in a noodle stirfry. The komatsuna is indeed a nice spinach replacement, except for being a favorite of the bugs, judging by their state when I picked them. I planted them where the kale is as a fill-in until the kale gets bigger, and that’s starting to happen, so they won’t last long in any case. If the bugs leave me enough they’ll not last long because I’ll eat them up.