Growing Food: Or Am I?

This sure was quite a year to choose to document my garden with all of you. I'm beginning to think that titling these "Growing Food" is a bit misleading of me, since the actual amount of food out there is pretty pathetic.

I did harvest a few things yesterday, though. Five tiny carrots that didn't have any foliage left on top, ditto one beet the size of a golf ball, and a hot pepper that had been on the plant my neighbor gave me and was all that was left on that plant once the grasshoppers were done with it.

We had some of the carrots for dinner. Butter knife for scale, I guess, although you can trust me when I tell you these were very baby carrots.

The grasshoppers are completing the destruction begun by the harlequin beetles, cucumber beetles, and hail. They are eating everything. Even the perennials. A. has resorted to spraying pesticide in our garden, which we have never done, just to keep the asparagus and rhubarb alive for next year.

I actually had a semi-ripe tomoto on one of the bigger plants that was protected enough by foliage it survived the hail storm.

A Stupice, because they are always The First Tomato.

It was foolish of me to leave it on the plant to ripen. The grasshoppers ate that, too.

Oddly, the one thing they haven't touched is the watermelon vines A. planted on a whim this year. And of course, that's the thing we are least likely to get an actual harvest from.

It's pretty grim, I gotta say.

At this point, I'm just trying to keep as many weeds from setting seeds as I can* and get the perennials through until next year. 

Next year is the hope of all gardeners. Especially when this year has been so wretched.

* Of course the weeds are flourishing. That is always the way.