Fear & Loathing in Las Vegetable Garden
It’s a bad vegetable garden day. I have good days and bad days and today is a bad day.
On the good days, I tell myself to be patient and that everything is growing fine.
On bad days, I pretty much think I suck at growing vegetables. *sigh*
No, no. I don’t want your sympathy or reassurances. I have looked at the evidence and it is true.
I was just over at Compost Bin. He has tomatoes. Honest to god tomatoes and he’s in NJ. I have tiny little tomato plants with a few measly attempts at blossoms.
The lettuce this year was a wash. I had made seed tape to plant it and didn’t count on the stray cat using the bed as a litter box… several times.*grrr* While the damn cat was covering his crap, he caught on the tape and pulled the whole strip out of the ground (and the seedlings on it). All of them like that. Not that it would have mattered, the really late frost would have killed the lettuce anyway.
My two-year-old insists on “helping” Mommy by pulling squash and cucumber seedlings out of the ground. I have tried to save them (the plants, not the kid. My husband has the job of saving him from his angry gardening mother), but they are all so small that I think they have given up on getting any bigger for fear that my plant murdering son will be able to spot them more easily.
What squash have not been killed by my son, are fighting for their very leaves against an army of slugs. Tristan can only eat so many and there are thousands, it seems.
One of my kohlrabi inexplicably burst into two pieces. I mean it. I found the top half lying on the ground next to the still planted bottom half. If that is not a sign from the gardening gods, I don’t know what is.
The deer have eaten the tops off every pepper plant I have and even tried to eat a tomato plant. For god sakes, tomatoes are part of the nightshade family and the foliage is poisonous! At least I can imagine that the deer died a horrible, agonizing death, or at least had one hell of a case of indigestion.
The cabbage seems to be okay, but they were planted late and the heads are only just forming. I am certain they will bolt at the first sign of truly warm weather.
Everything is so small. How will they ever make vegetables?
My only hope is the tomatoes. Between the ones I planted and the volunteers, if hot weather ever does come, they will all shoot up and I will have more tomatoes than I can eat. Perhaps I can whore out my over production and trade other, better gardeners for all the stuff I am too incompetent to grow.
I so suck at this. I need a gardening Zoloft.