That thing at the end of the garden

8 July 2008

You know, that bit of ground into which I put some seeds and wandered off.
The vegetable patch, right. It feels like I’m not doing so well this year. Partly because I’m not accosted by luscious green leaves and vines the moment I step outside the door. Things are a little smaller in scale than last year. Not quite so grab-you-round-the-throat-lush. But they’re still growing.

Ahem. Well, some of them are.

Yo, sweetcorn, what did I do to you? Hmm? Last year you took off like a thing possessed, leading me to leave more plants to grow than I’d planned. Ok, so this year – admittedly with a different seed type – I thought I’d just put two seeds in at each station, rather than the three prescribed by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I wanted to avoid a glut in my smaller allotted space for corn. But insodoing I seem to have displeased Mrs Ingalls Wilder. A couple of plants deigned to show themselves above ground. The rest of the seed rotted.

I poked a few leftover kernels from last year’s packet into the ground and a couple of those are now growing, so with any luck I might just get a meal out of the sweetcorn part of my patch. Smart arse vegetables.

The onions are beginning to look more like onions now. The potatoes have gone long and leggy, as apparently that’s the only kind of potato haulm I can cultivate. Even when I buy seed potatoes and follow the frigging instructions (rather than scraping the bottom of the potato sack and shoving them into the ground as darkness falls) they still refuse to look all bushy and cute. Well, it’s been raining a fair bit recently, so who wants to place the first bet on when they’re all gonna get blight and the Irish will be up chip creek without a potato again?

The broad beans over by the fence are just about standing up straight and the pods are now forming, though they still feel quite hollow at this stage. The blackfly and creepy ants that had previously seen fit to set up business on the tips of the plants have long since been, ahem, dispersed. And that bit of earth that I’d left bare for either a second sowing or turnips or something remains bare.

Click for the set

4 Comments Posted in: garden, photography

Comments

4 Responses to “That thing at the end of the garden”

citystreams
9th July 2008 @ 1:32 am

Wow! You’re so talented Sarah. And I love the photo collage from 7 days. Thanks for leaving my pool hair out of it! I linked to you in a post about sweet tea (and composting tea bags). Hope you don’t mind. I’ll take it out if you do.
Sarah
9th July 2008 @ 9:58 am

Of course I don’t mind, link away to your heart’s content!
lauren
9th July 2008 @ 1:25 pm

chip creek….genius
RisibleGirl
9th July 2008 @ 6:42 pm

Lessee…. I have 9 strawberry plants, and so far see only one strawberry even close to being an actual strawberry.

I have three tomato plants and all have gone very leggy and NO tomatoes.

Interestingly enough- I was digging in part of my yard to plant some passion flower vines around a new arbor I put together and found a bunch of wee potatoes growing. I thought they were weeds!

I never planted them, so they’ve been growing on their own for at least three years (that’s when we moved here).