Dear Tomato

 

Dear Tomato,

I don't usually like to resort to this type of language, but you suck. All of you. (Well, not the cherry tomatoes, they are just fine). But you? You are infuriating. You are stubborn and selfish. I gave you just as much as much sunshine as other years (and don't try to tell me the apple tree created too much shade...we all know how wimpy that apple tree is). And yet you refused to turn red! Here you are, bright green, plump, enormous, so very nearly delicious. But hello? It is October 3! You just aren't going to get ripe, are you. I can tell you're going to be a dick about it. I've been watching you since early August...I know what you're up to. And I think it sucks.

Why can't you be more like cherry tomato? Sure, cherry tomato was a little late to the game this year, but she came through. Cherry tomato was in the "shade of the apple tree," too, and she did just fine. I'm talking to you Supersteak. I'm talking to you Big Rainbow. WTF??

I hope you have enjoyed not fulfilling your destiny.

Sincerely,

Liana

With that off my chest, I will now turn my attention to one of the crops that has worked this year: pole beans! These here are Kentucky Wonder Beans, and they are disturbingly large and plentiful.

Last night I used a ton of them in my favorite pasta dish: Orzo with Everything. This is a recipe that my sister made at my house years and years ago, and I have since then adapted to my own mish-mash of ingredients. It's like a big, awesome salad made from whatever you have in your crisper with some noodles added at the end. As a rule of thumb, though, it must contain some sort of pasta, some sort of crunchy element, some sort of bitter element, something salty, something acidic, and something fatty.

Here's how I like to do it:

Get a big pot of salted water going and turn the oven on to 350. Chop up any vegetables you want to roast (I used peeled beets, shallots, and garlic) and put them on a baking sheet. Toss them with olive oil and a bunch of kosher salt and bake them for 20 minutes.

In the meantime, what else do you have in your fridge?

I chopped up some radicchio, arugula, and basil and threw them in a big bowl. And then I blanched my pole beans in the boiling water and chopped those up, too.

Once the beans were boiled, I added my pasta to the water.

I grabbed some olives and capers and tossed a bunch in, and then for crunch, I chopped up some roasted almonds.

A whole package of feta joined the party, and so did the roasted veggies when they were done. And finally, in went the cooked noodles, which sort of wilts the lettuces and melts the feta.

To finish it off, I whipped up a dressing with several glugs of olive oil, a good squeeze of lemon, and a healthy dose of champagne vinegar. (For the record, I ate thirds...no thanks to you, tomato!)

Halfway House

I feel it important you all know that as I begin writing this blog post, the lyrics "Ooooh, we're halfway there, oh OH living on a prayer!" are blasting in my head. That's what I get for trying to tell you the story about my weekend and how I only got halfway along on everything I started.

I think the problem is the dogs. Yes, we should certainly blame it on the dogs.

For one whole fun-filled week, we are watching Camper's friend, Carl Barks (yes, that is his full name.) Camper and Carl spend most of their time chewing on each other's teeth. It makes a horrible clanking sound, but they seem to find it fun. These two have gotten into more trouble together in one week than Camper has ever gotten into on his own. The first night we had Carl, he pooped on the floor. So naturally Camper did, too. I think it was a solidarity thing. They have broken out of their barricades, slept on our heads, chased squirrels to an inch of their lives, whined, cried, been tied up together outside of the fabric shop like a two-headed monster, and together, they managed to get an avocado off of the kitchen counter and eat the entire ripe contents by the time we got home. An hour later, I got off the phone with animal poison control (who informed me they would be a little sick but just fine). Thanks a lot, internet, for telling me they might DIE.

So I was a little off my game.

There were these sunflower seeds that I roasted. Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to roast your own sunflower seeds? Well let me tell you! After you cut the head off the sunflower, you have to go through and extract each individual seed with your fingertips. After a thorough cleaning (and an inspection for worms--GROSS), you then soak the seeds in salt water for 24 hours, then roast them for 30 minutes or so at 350. When they came out of the oven, I put them into a cute little bowl and saucer I made in pottery class. Guess what? MOST of the sunflower pods didn't even have seeds. We were just sitting there, chewing on these salty little shells, and every now and then you'd find a thin little sliver of sunflower seed goodness. I kept thinking, this would be the perfect diet food! You do all that work and get like 5 calories, but the salt makes you feel like you ate something.

Seriously, why do people do this?

Next up were two botched dress upgrades. The first was an attempt to dye a cute little white dress I bought at a thrift store. I was thinking indigo ombre. Doesn't that sound fabulous? All in all, it was a $14, one-hour-long failed experiment, so not a big deal. But let me just give you this word of advice: You absolutely cannot dye synthetic fibers with RIT dye. The box tells you that, and you may be tempted to not believe the box. But seriously, the box means it. So this little polyester Grecian goddess number? Yeah, it turned a color I'm going to call "silvery cream." It's fine. It's whatever. It is NOT ombre. And it is certainly not indigo. I would show you a photo of the "after," but it's, um, sort of the same.

Next up, I decided to do a little surgery on a vintage dress I bought online. The dress is so cute, but the sleeves were hideous and made me look boxy and frump-a-dump, so I decided to do a little hem at the shoulder and lop them off. The first sleeve went off just fine. The second, I don't know what happened. I think an evil spirit lives in the bobbin of my sewing machine. When I got around the entire armhole, I looked on the underside of the fabric to see the most hideous knot nest looping its wicked way all around the inside of the sleeve. It was so nasty looking that I just set the dress down and backed away slowly. In fact, we might just pretend that never happened.

There was, however, one bright shimmering project that went beyond the halfway point today--I potted this succulent. I had intended this pot and saucer to be a little planter, but the holes in the pot had partially filled with glaze (see: amateur potter). So after we threw out the stupid sunflower seeds, Robb drilled holes in the bottom of the pot through the glaze and I popped this little succulent in place. It took about three minutes, but it was deeply satisfying. With the help of Bon Jovi, I lived on the prayer that I would finish a single project this weekend, and my prayers were answered.

Last Sunday

Last Sunday started off all wrong. We woke up in the morning and decided to go to the "dog beach" in New Jersey, so from a sleepy state in bed, Robb reserved a zipcar on his phone, and I set about making some iced coffee. We left the house in a rush, took the subway two stops to the most unfortunately named subway stop (Flushing), and then when we got above ground, Robb received a voicemail saying that the people who had our zipcar were going to be late. Real late.

We decided to cancel.

On the way back home--no dog beach, no ocean--I got terribly cranky. I wanted to swim, damn it! And here I was, locked in this ugly Brooklyn jail, all stupid concrete and asphalt. On the way back to our house, Robb noticed some people walking by us with towels over their shoulders on their way back from the McCarren Pool. He made me go ask them if the line was long, and they said, no, there's no line at all. We knew right then that we would go swimming...at the giant public pool that we had never been to! All this time, we had thought that it would suck, figuring it would be crowded, gross, with dirty kids running around everywhere. Not so...it was pretty and blue and big and open, and we swam some laps and snoozed on our towels. From that point on, the day looked up.

And as inspiration for this coming weekend--nay, the last weekend of what truly feels like summer--I wanted to post some inspirational photos from my last Sunday. It is my sincerest wish, dear friends, that your weekend will deliver.

This is a lettuce plant that bolted. Like, beyond bolted. I think it's pretty. It's also probably pretty bitter.

This is a supersteak tomato that soon enough will be ready for eating. 

And these are our wet towels and bathing suits, hanging up after a day of swimming. (The Ciroc towel, by the way, was my prize for winning the Michael McDonald singing competition one night at NitaNita...proud memory, for sure.) 

Here are two rising loafs of bread that I decided to make on a whim. They were very salty. Which is great if you like salty bread (I do).

Here are the almonds that I accidentally spilled in my purse. I had to dump them on the counter, which always feels classy.

And here is the binding on my newest Alabama Chanin dress. It's sloppy and it looks like straw, an aesthetic choice that I feel okay about.

Building Fences

Today we built fences. I feel like there should be a metaphor in that statement, but it's the truth. It was Sunday and we each ate breakfast-for-one (mine were two slender* slices of toast with peanut butter and a brulee cup filled with peaches, strawberries, yogurt, and Kashi GoLean Crunch; Robb got four fat slabs of bacon from the Brooklyn Meat Hook and fried them up, then wisely ate them as a BLT [*We only had one roll and I donated most of the bread to Robb's BLT cause.]) And so, after coffees and foods and pretty good nights of sleep, we headed out into the hot muggy yard. You couldn't pick a worse day for building fences. A layer of thick, wet heat hung around our heads. I pulled up weeds and discovered the birthplace of all mosquitoes ever. Robb set up his sawhorse and consistently misplaced his entirely see-through safety glasses. (My joke about them being like Wonder Woman's jet--invisible, and therefore hard to find on the runway--did not find great reception.) We measured and sliced our lattices into smart little pieces, stapled together the broken bits, drilled two-by-fours into the corners. Camper sulked at the kitchen window for hours before finally laying down on the cool tiles, where he continued to sulk in his sleep. You see, our fence is blocking him from his favorite hang-out--under the rhododenron bush is where he spies on the kittens that seem to have been born in the weeds of the neighbor's yard. He likes to lie in the cool dirt beneath the bush and watch for movement, barking at mysterious branches that bend in the wind, squirrels, birds, butterflies. And on very special occasions, kittens, who are not scared of him, mind you. They just stare at him blankly, knowing they are safe. 

While Camper has been enjoying a summer full of kitten chases across our vegetable beds, our lettuce crops, funny enough, never grew. If the life of a single lettuce plant ever began this summer, it was ended quickly under the paws of sweet Camper, who likely tore up their delicate roots in his impossibly futile kitten hunt. After a while, the weeds crept in and we felt too tired to figure out which (if any) were seedlings and which were weeds. And so we let the area grow over with a rampant vine called purple bells. It's a vine we planted on purpose years back, hoping to train them to climb our fences (which they did), but without knowing that the bells would find their way into every bed of dirt--even between the cracks on the walkway--and if you feel just weary enough from life, just tired enough to let go, the purple bells will take advantage of your malaise and literally grow up and over every plant and structure in your garden. (The year we got married, we came home to find our garden shellacked in the vine--even the cherry tree had long, twisting vines snaking around every branch.) 

But because we are the ones who decide if there will be arugula in our future, we have elected to take control of the situation. Yesterday, all of the purple bells came out (except the ones on the fence, because they will still always be pretty). We built the short lattice fence and re-tilled that area of the garden and started all over again, which feels very ballsy in the middle of July. It is called a mid-season crop in many gardening books. In my gardening book, I call it a do-over. And why not have a do-over? (And here, I will make a metaphor, because I believe this to be as true in life as in the garden.) It's just seeds and dirt. It's just sun and time and sweat. And when you come indoors, it's just air-conditioning, and a tall glass of bubbly water with a splash of cranberry, and a bowl of homemade salsa and tortilla chips, and the second half of the original 1976 version of The Bad News Bears (because the damned Netflix on-demand crapped out on us last night right as the Bears were making a comeback). There's a scrape on my arm from the raw edge of wood, but there was also a very good shower and a very good nap. But best of all, there is the feeling that we took back our garden today from forces that we felt were beyond our control. We said damn it, I want to eat a fancy salad of mesclun and arugula and beets, and I don't want to buy it at the farmer's market. I will grow it myself, thank you very much. And you know what? I do believe we will.

A final word on growing a successful garden. I am no expert, and I have (and continue to have) many failures, but I have come to realize that my most successful gardens are the ones that I look at every single day. Not from the back steps. I mean that you should take a tour of your garden every day. Visit with them all as you brush your teeth before work, and say hello when you come home later that day. See how the plants are doing. Take note of what is being nibbled on. Then worry about how you can fix it. Take pictures of the plants you're most proud of. Say prayers for your weaklings. Think about fertilizing, even if you don't do it. Pull the weeds as they pop up, and most importantly, at all costs, you have got to stay on top of those damned purple bells. (And now, if you feel like it, you may make the metaphor, for who knows what plague of vines haunt your yard, just waiting for your summer ennui to kick in so that they may run rampant.)

Here's a New One: Garlic

So do you remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about my wimpy little apple tree, and how amazing it was that something so puny could actually be producing so many apples? Well, right after I wrote that post, Robb and I went on a five day road trip. When we returned, all of the apples had fallen off the tree. No joke! And to think I had thought it was safe to be optimistic. Dreaming of apple pies, even. Like a fool! A FOOL! What happened, you might wonder? Well, at first we thought we could blame it on a feral cat, or a squirrel. We needed there to be some sort of monster in the plot line to make sense of it all. But upon further investigation, I now suspect it was just a strong breeze. That tree, man...it really is as weak as it looks. I honest to God think that those apples just couldn't hang on. They were like calcium-deficient apples, apples that always hated P.E. Maybe some day they'll develop some muscles and actually hang on, but for now, it's going to be another apple-less year I'm afraid.

But did you really think I would come all this way just to tell you some shitty bum-out news? No! That's not what this blog is about (for the most part). As the saying goes, when God closes a door, he opens a window*. Or in this case, when God kills your apples, he gives you garlic.

That's right! We have garlic! This is a thing we tried to grow last year, but I strongly suspect we planted them at the wrong time of year. And then forgot about them. It was silly. (Robb and I are very bad about understanding what time of year to plant things...I swear, all we have to do is a simple Google search, or just check the gardening book that is literally right next to our bed. But no, we prefer to stay ignorant on most issues pertaining to timing.) This year, however, my very smart friend Morgan gave me heads up that it was time to plant the garlic. In case you're wondering, the time of year to do this (at least on the East Coast) is in the fall. Like, if you're planting bulbs for the spring, just plant some garlic, too. It'll be neat.

Neatest of all is how you actually grow garlic. Have you ever kept garlic around your house so long that nice green shoots start growing out of the cloves? Well, that's your garlic trying to make more garlic. And when you plant cloves of garlic in soil, that shoot comes out of the ground and grows nice and tall, and each one of those underground cloves eventually develops into an entire head of garlic. Amazing! So to plant your own garlic, all you have to do is buy some strong, healthy, yummy looking heads of garlic at your farmers market or grocery store, pull apart the cloves, and then stick each clove in the ground about six inches apart from each other in rows.

We started to notice how happy our garlic was when winter ended--there they were, these enormous green stalks all grouped together in a thicket. About a month ago, Morgan informed me that the skinny, curly green tubes growing out of my plants were the garlic scapes (which are yummy to chop up and eat in salads or with eggs). Soon after that, the plants started to die back, so it seemed to finally be time to dig them up.

One by one, we started pulling them out of the ground, large and small, cute as can be.

And then suddenly we had way more garlic than any humans really need. (Insert vampire joke here?)

And then I said, "Hey Robb, pick up all that garlic at the same time! I want to take a picture!" And then he did the same to me, but his photo turned out A LOT cuter than mine, so that's all you get here, folks.

Now that they're out of the ground, the garlic bulbs are currently making a huge mess on our dining room table whilst they "cure." I don't really know what this means, but it's basically letting the garlic dry out so you can store it. After a few weeks of curing, I can braid the stalks and make a cool looking thing to hang on the wall and be like, "Anyone want some home grown garlic?" and then just casually reach over and yank off a clove. (All my life, I thought those garlic braids were just for decoration...who knew they were edible?)

But tonight, we couldn't resist trying out our crop, and we chopped up a whole head to go in a homemade marinara sauce. And yes, I'm still enjoying the afterglow of that good, garlicky taste, and yes, you're probably glad I'm not meeting you for drinks right now, because then you would also be enjoying the garlicky afterglow.

Hey by the way! If you want to grow your own garlic, but you want more information than I included in this lousy post, check out this lovely tutorial at Fine Gardening. They are far more helpful than I am! (It's their jobs.)


*All of the wisdom I have learned in my life came from The Sound of Music.

An Apple Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Admittedly, we have the sorriest looking apple tree in all of Brooklyn. The feral cats like to jump up onto that brick wall, and then down they hop onto our side, stepping on the weak little sappling branches that were once on the right side of the tree. (Now that all of the branches have broken off, they use the trellis.) Its trunk is far from mighty, rivaling maybe a broomstick for girth. In fact, a rope attached to the fence keeps the thing from blowing over on a windy day. Its one long central stem reaches awkwardly up up up (yay!), and then over (wah wah). Between the top and the bottom, the foliage hasn't even thought about filling out, though the bottom section tries to put on a brave show, puffing out its sorry chest. 

Despite its scrawny ways--and despite all odds really--this tree is actually growing fruit. At last count, in fact, 26 apples!! Amazing, right?

Last year we were shocked to discover that it was growing a few little apples--right about this size--but a gust of wind blew them off. Or perhaps a feral cat sneezed and away they went. But I don't know, this year seems a bit more promising. 26 apples! And they keep growing and becoming more apple-like every day! And yes, I do go outside and look at them every single day. But just because things are looking promising this year, I know better than to get my hopes up. You see, in a garden, you never know what funky shit is gonna go down. See those tiny red spots on the leaves above? Who's to say those aren't the eggs of tiny red spiders and that when I come home from our Memorial Day road trip next week, the whole tree won't be encased in a spider cocoon? Do spider cocoons actually exist? Nope! But every single year, something happens to at least one of my crops that I had no idea even existed. Case in point: a bacteria that gets in your dirt and cuts off the vascular system of tomato plants so that water can't reach the leaves, killing the plant right as the fruit starts to ripen. And then the bacteria stays in your soil for five years. What kind of asshole bacteria is that? (Needless to say, the tomato plants will be in containers this year. Don't worry, the containers are cute! More on that soon...)

So, while I am excited and keeping vigilant watch over my sorry ass fruit-bearing apple tree, I refuse to count my apples until they are, well, in my belly. Sliced and cinnamoned. Smothered in a rich brie. Eaten like the hand-fruit that they are. Let us now pray for the apples, shall we?

Another thing that needs prayers in our garden is, well, the entire garden. This is our first year gardening with a dog! A dog, I might add, whose sole purpose in life is to walk with his nose to the ground and his butt in the air, sniffing every last thing on God's green earth. We have TV to entertain us--this dog has his nose. And one of his favorite things to do is take laps of our yard, sidestepping (or not) whatever new plant has popped up.

That being said, we have taken some protective measures. Exhibit A: Flower Jail. Within one minute of these flowers going in the ground last weekend, he had already stepped on one of the dahlias. Nah ah, we said. And upon realizing that the flower bed was the exact size of our defunct fire pit stand, we picked it up and placed it over the flowers. And...STAY OUT.

Is it a little sad to have to put your flowers in flower jail? Well, yeah. But it would be a lot sadder if they all got trampled. Or pooped on. Or both. As I said, this is the year of the vigilant garden. I absolutely cannot control whatever mother nature has in store--and she's got some ideas, let me tell you--but I can try. I can watch my apples, and I can soap down the tree at the first sign of a red spider infestation. And I am not too proud to barricade my dahlias until they grow strong strong strong. Then, one day, be they apple tree or flower bush, they will be big and burly enough to stand on their own. And I will be over there, in the chaise lounge, hopefully sipping a cold, delicious beer.

Dithering in Brooklyn

I've been in this house for a few years now, and each year, I do a blog post about nothing but spring. Spring spring delicious spring. It feels like very familiar territory. Maybe because that's what this blog is all about. (Or, in my thesis that I haven't written, what I want this blog to be all about.) Bright colors, new life, the happiness of coincidence, the passage of a day. 

Just yesterday I walked to the local Buffalo Exchange to buy some new jeans (yup, ripped the crotch on another pair...what is it with me and my chafey thighs?), and I thought, I'll just bring the camera. You never know what you'll see along the way. And sure enough, there were these purple flowers. A sea of them, in fact, crashing upon my head. To say that they are bursting from the tree would be silly. They are a floral infestation. They are positively frothing. This tree is at its ecstatic zenith. If a tree could have an orgasm, this would be it! May I look at this photo and always remember how lush it feels to stand in the presence of a tree this joyous. 

It seems that each spring, there is a day that feels like this, when you just know that everything is going to be okay. 80 degrees, a sweet perfume of blossoms, followed by a strawberry banana smoothie called Girlfriend Getaway from a local eatery. (Seriously, it's a very embarrassing smoothie to order: "One Girlfriend Getaway, please!") 

Not ten feet from the ecstatic purple tree was a border of tulips hanging on for dear life, their giant voluptuous petals starting to lean back against the air. Oh, dear sweet sinewy tulips...I wish we were able to grow you in our yard, but alas, we have gremlins that chop off your head before you even bloom.  It was a serious problem last year, but this year its fatal. The gremlin has perfected his system. Thankfully, daffodils are not delicious to the gremlin, and we have lots of those. 

Earlier that day, before the jeans shopping and the Girlfriend Getaway and the insanity of the purple flowers, I worked in our backyard and Camper followed me around, a loyal devotee. I gave him a bath and then made him sit outside. I read Nancy Drew; he chewed on a bone. Later we went for a very wimpy run (my jogging is pretty much his natural walking pace). There were squirrels to chase and old Polish ladies to sniff, so I can only assume he had fun.

Camper also helped me transplant my tomato plants to a bigger cup size (which is not meant to sound like I'm talking about bras, but if I were, I guess you could say that the plants went from an A-cup to a C). There's something about going from that tiny plastic cup to a big old pint-sized plastic cup that just drives my tomato plants wild. Over the next three weeks, they will undergo a massive transformation, from puny little sprogs to robust burly plants. Part of this growth spurt is because, when I transfer them over, I thin them down--my least favorite gardening task. Of the two or three little tomato plants growing in each cup, I have to decide which one looks the strongest, which one has the best chance at survival, and that's the one I get to keep--the rest of the sprogs get yanked. It always feels like such a waste, but I know it's for the greater good. Perspective, Liana! No wimpy tomatoes!

So this is weird. Yesterday, when I was thinning my poor plants, I realized that all of the stems were purple. Are the stems of tomato plants always purple at this phase, I thought? I've been growing tomatoes for four years now, and for the life of me I don't remember purple stems. I took this tangled sprog photo above to share with you all.

And then my inner Martha Stewart stylist said, no, Liana, line them up all pretty. No one wants to see that tangled mess.

Around this time, I looked up from my tomato stem styling long enough to notice that my special mutation daffodil--my dear old friend--had bloomed. Ah yes, my double daffodil, growing beneath the cherry tree. It's become ritual now, me and this daffodil. It's always late to bloom, having two heads to sprout instead of one. I prop its head up with my hand and we say hello to each other. Each year, I look into the heart of this flower and try to see where it starts being a daffodil and where it stops. It has none of that decidedly buttercup shaping. It's not even a classic yellow. It's almost more of a dahlia, but now that's not quite right either, is it. Each year, its genetic memory winters over in the bulb, and it remembers to grow up exactly as odd as it did the last year. A gorgeously strange mutation, like no other in the world. And it's in my backyard. Mine mine mine. I feel very lucky indeed.

2011: Year of the Bedroom Lettuce Garden!

2010 was the year of the bedroom peppers. Remember how Robb and I dug up his pepper plants around this time last year, put them into giant pots, and then moved them into our bedroom windows? That was kind of weird. But it worked! Sort of. Actually, they kind of "died" for awhile, but then came back to life in the spring, and then we moved them outdoors and they grew tons of flowers, which all beared fruit...but the peppers tasted kinda weird. Like, not really hot, and sort of papery. So, a fun experiment! But also sort of a failure! I'm okay with those odds, but I got to thinking we could do better this year...with lettuce!

And chard! (That's what's shown above.)

OK, actually, the lettuce was supposed to go outside. I had this whooooole thing planned out in my head where I was going to plant the lettuce in October and then build this sort of shitty coldframe type of structure so that I could keep them from freezing. But then it snowed on Halloween, which pretty much killed all of the lettuce I had already moved outdoors. I still had a bunch of lettuce growing in pods on our sunny bedroom windowsill, though, so I got out a long container, filled it with soil, and transplanted the lettuce pods to the container. 

So far so good! They seem to like our bedroom! I have the window cracked open so they can get that chill that they like, but the radiator nearby keeps 'em from getting too chilly.

I admit, it might be a little weird to take your salad spinner into the bedroom to grab your evening's side dish, but those are circumstances I can live with. 

In the meantime, I wanted you to enjoy these pretty green leaves on this dreary day (well, dreary in NYC anyway). See, look! Green things!! Growing! Don't you feel better?

Winners & One Big Weird Loser

When things go wrong in the garden, it's hard to explain the disappointment. It's not quite like if your child or even your dog were suddenly ill. No, nothing like that at all. But it's not quite as insignificant as a failed pie crust or accidentally overcooked fish. Those are easy disappointments...simply pour your guests a little more wine and all will be forgiven (if not forgotten). No. When something goes wrong in the garden, it's somewhere in between. It's like ruining the pie and then being told that, as a consequence, you can't have pie for another year. Mild horror could ensue (depending on your sweet tooth), followed by a heaviness that feels better, only momentarily, after stomping your foot a few times. Then there's a mad dash to research books and raid the internet, trying to find out what you did wrong, how you can fix it...can you fix it?...And you try to save it, but sometimes, the opportunity is just gone.

That's how I feel about my tomatoes. It seems that there is something wrong with the soil. A bacterial wilt issue. How? Why? When? It's not the end of the world...the plants aren't dead. They're just SLOW. And a little brown. And not all that happy. And we can't plant tomatoes in that patch for 4 to 5 years. So I will not be presenting my coworkers with any three pound heirloom tomatoes this year, or leaving little paper bags full of cherry tomatoes for the neighbors. I will savor each one of my skimpy bounty. I will supplement with the farmers market and try not to feel bitter. And in the meantime, I will celebrate what IS working in the garden.

Speaking of which, these hollyhocks are WORKING. For the last three years, I've tried to grow hollyhocks from seed. And they've sort of worked. Sort of. Except for all the weeds surrounding them, tangling their roots, preventing them from ever getting much taller than my knees. This year we decided to mulch the flower beds and it was a life changing experience. Mulch is a miracle that keeps weeds from growing so that your plants can actually, just, GROW, and not get all buried in the ivy monster like they have in previous years. And this year they are growing and growing, taller than the broccoli, taller than the rhododendron...

And they are just getting started! Just look at all these future budlets, just waiting to burst forth with their papery fuschia petals and mesmerizing stamens.

Taller, of course, than the hollyhocks is the single mammoth sunflower that has taken off like a rocket. It's currently about 6'5" and still growing, its stem as thick and strong as a tennis racquet (the handle part anyway). It's funny...there's another mammoth sunflower on the opposite side of the yard, but it's only at about 4 feet. It's in a slightly shadier patch, but isn't it interesting what a difference an extra hour of daily sun can make?

And here it is from down below, all overexposed so that you can see the large leaves against the sky. In this photo I especially love that you can't see the top, so it's easy to imagine it just keeps going and going, like Jack and the Beanstalk. (Cue Sondheim theater nerd reference: There are Giants in the Sky....)

 

Is Sondheim a good transition to melons? Why not! In the photo above I present to you the most darling thing in our yard right now. A tiny little watermelon! It's so darling, in fact, that I'm honestly scared that jackals are going to come steal it at night. Or someone will step on it or hit a croquet ball right into it and there will be some sort of Humpty Dumpty-esque accident. It's just so....cute! And it's the only one, and we've never successfully grown watermelons before. So, you know, I'm feeling protective. Say a little fruity prayer for this one because we really like him.

And here, a major success story...the pepper plant that we brought indoors last year. It's alive in a BIG way. Look at all of these peppers! It's laden with them! Although I must point out that we tried to eat one earlier this week and it was a little...funky. It smelled hot but it wasn't. The skin was a bit chewy. It was a bit bitter. I dunno, but something wasn't quite right. So, Frankenpepper lived to tell the tale, but he was never quite the same. (I feel like there's a lesson to be learned in this...maybe about cloning. Listen up, future! Some things are better left un-messed with!)

Note also in the above photo just how damn much is going on. There's a basil plant right below the peppers, a strawberry plant to its left, cucumbers behind it, a big sunflower leaf overhead...madness! Once again, we've let things get a little out of control.

And because it wouldn't be a KYP blog post without something shameful, it is now time to present to you the biggest weirdest loser of them all: this corn. I mean, jeez!!! What is HAPPENING here? It's like a vitamin deficient old man! One of those old skeezers that has like three strands of hair that he keeps real long and combs over his bald head...hygiene be damned, he's going out on the town!

Every year we check the seed packet to make sure we're not actually growing horse feed, and every year the corn still grows like this. What is UP with that?

Well, clearly we have a lot to learn. And we've been very lucky, despite our tomato issues and terminally ill corn. A cucumber beetle scare last week seems to have passed (knock on wood), and there's still hope for the carrots and the onions. But you never know what potential disaster or enormous success is waiting around the corner. Each day is so emotional! Such an adventure! It's really shocking sometimes--almost embarrassing--when I look out into our yard and realize how much I care.

Giant Flowers, Small Potatoes

Friends, I come to you with dirty fingernails and a full heart today. As I mentioned in a completely ridiculous Facebook post yesterday, not only has my Big Rainbow tomato plant--my favorite of all the heirlooms, of course--decide to die, but my dear friend Nicole has decided to move back to L.A. (And here is the ridiculous part): Brooklyn will be less juicy and delicious without both.

And yes, when I'm sad I think in fruit-related metaphors. It's sort of my thing.

And so I found myself a bit confused and--I won't lie--slightly annoyed when I went outside this morning and discovered these gigantic pink cheerful flowers. Every year, right around this time, they bloom in our neighbor's yard, and none of us has any idea what they are. But each year, they seem to grow out from nothing and are suddenly there, a big pink reminder that August has nearly arrived.

Today, they were a shock to my mood. There I was, all ready to stand before the Big Rainbow tomato plant and mourn its lost potential, followed by a walk to work where I would imagine Nicole packing up her car (which she was doing at that very moment) and driving toward the city limits. But no, this was the day that the giant pink flowers decided to arrive. I think they knew I was sulking.

Or maybe they bloomed days ago and I've been too busy sulking to notice. (But for the love of Pete, how could someone not notice such a large, pink flower? I guess that's more of a philosophical question than a real one.)

  

And so I stopped and counted my blessings, of which there are many.

And then, feeling lucky, I suppose, I got out my trowel and dug around in the potato bucket for a minute. (I know, that was sort of a jerky transition...giant flower to potato?) The plant has started dying back over the last month, which I guess means that the potatoes are, um, ready. So I sunk my trowel deep into the dirt, and boom, hit something solid yet decidedly not rock hard. I scooped aside some dirt and there it was.

A potato.

The moral of the story is this: Blessings come in funny packages. And today, I was comforted by a great big bunch of gigantic pink flowers and a single tiny potato. I take them as signs of forward movement, for me, for Nicole, and even for Big Rainbow, which will probably go in the compost pile, generating next season's new life.