That Which Shall Not Be Discussed

You may have noticed that there has been no talk of the garden this year.

Or you may be busy with your own lives and not give one good goddamn about my tomato yammering.  That is also possible.

But since I prefer the self-centered interpretation of things whenever possible, I'm just assuming that you've been wondering what ever could be going on in Kristin's garden this year.

You probably shouldn't ask.

Every time I go out there, I must fight the urge to trickle tears all over the weedy earth.  No sense giving those bastards any more moisture than necessary.

In addition to the HOLY HELL WEEDS EVERYWHERE that I cannot pull up even though I still do every time I go out there because I can't help myself and then really regret it later when I can't walk, there is the rabbit damage.  Which has been extensive.

They ate the spinach.  They ate much of the bean plants that Cubby and I so laboriously planted, although some of them are recovering.  They ate the tops off of all the glorious beets that were growing so nicely and then stopped growing because they, uh, didn't have any tops.  They ate most of the tops off most of the carrots that were also performing splendidly, though I have hopes that they'll recover.

And they did all this despite the garden cloth I had over these plants.  I guess they just limboed under it in the spaces between the bricks weighing it down. And I didn't notice in time to prevent much of the damage because I just haven't been getting out there all that much.

We don't usually have such a problem with rabbits in the garden because of the dogs.  But this year, due to new garden fencing arrangements and the fact that Otty has had to be tied up much of the time because of behavior issues, the dogs just haven't been in the garden.  And the rabbits have.  A. trapped one and the dogs got a couple, but it appears there is a never ending supply in the gully by the garden.

I'm not too happy with the potato field either.  They all got covered with mulch once.  Some of them got a second mulching, but not all.  There are so many weeds in there I can't even see the potatoes.  And the weeds are taller than I am.  I will definitely not be using this method again when I'm able to do the hilling, because I can't do the mulching by myself and no one else has the time to do it, so it's all just kind of neglected.  Hilling sucks, but I can do it whenever I need to and it kills the weeds in addition to covering the potatoes.The potatoes are there, they are growing and flowering, but I don't know what the harvest will be like.

The tomatoes are growing nicely, but they aren't tied up so they're pretty wild.  All I did this year was have A. put up fence posts and fencing running along the rows to at least keep the plants from doing a complete flop into the dirt.  It will also make it damn near impossible to harvest them, I suspect, but we'll worry about that when it's time to harvest.

The first planting of chard got totally overtaken by weeds.  The second planting of chard got totally eaten by the chickens (I think).  The tilling seems to have sliced up the few missed potatoes from last year into innumerable little pieces that then all sprouted, leading to small volunteer potato plants everydamnwhere that are now bushing out alarmingly and taking over neighboring plants and yet not actually producing any potatoes of usable size.

This is what I see when I go out to the garden.  And this is why I don't go out there much anymore.  It's very sad.

But, as I have mentioned before, the nice thing about gardening is there's always next year.  And the year after.  It's got to improve from this.  Right?