Every year is different...the first was more peppers than anyone should eat in a span of a few weeks (when you get to "free, take some" from the kitchen at work, it's a lot!), last year was a crazy abundance of strawberries (those we didn't give away :-D) and okra and a good amount of cucumbers while the vining plants did pretty pathetic. And then there's this year.
As we have already established; it is apparently the year of the vine. Cucumbers failed miserably all over, but it's a great year to be a squash or melon, that's for sure! My yard, another co-worker's Chinese squash vines, someone else I talked to, and the garden plot all have these crazy vines trying to take over the world.
I've done a terrible job of getting out there for the first half of the summer, but my coworker would send me photos entitled, "I think our garden has gone feral".
It certainly looks that way. You walk in and the beds are still somewhat separated, but there are those trying to cross borders and tear down divides.
Since this picture, this little guy grew to about the size of a volleyball and picked himself so we ate him. He was actually quite good!
Cantaloupe took over the potato towers.
And a pumpkin decided to crawl up the fence and grow.
The whole grand scope of chaos (except this is only about half of the garden)...
Last year our raspberries got a disease which apparently stays in the soil so we would never be able to plant raspberries in that spot again. Alas.
Except that this year one of the three started growing back! Wow!
Ok, we'll just let it be and then put down 2 paving stones next to it and put pots on them.
Except that two more started growing out from underneath the paving stones. Okay then.
My coworker calls them zombie raspberries because they really did like come back from the dead and reach out from under their tombstones and call out, "braaaaains" (ok, I may have made that last one up).
They are going strong and the biggest has produced a few little raspberries!
So yes, you walk into our garden and see chaos: green, overgrown chaos...and most especially vining chaos. And therefore you could conclude that it's a wild jungle of craziness. Unruly, disorienting and unpleasant.
But then I look over and see a pumpkin nestled cozily on top of a tomato cage in a bed 8 feet from where it started; in and amongst (and under and over and around) the tomatoes and peanuts...and I see not chaos and disorder, but a Utopian paradise where, despite their differences, species freely live in harmony together. One might even say creating their own trellises using each other's vines as support. It's beautiful.
Touching, really.
And then we eat them.
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