the best laid tomato plants

You know, I always plant my garden with the very best of intentions.  I weed and water faithfully for a good two weeks until life intervenes.  Then I kind of forget to water.  Or I go out to water, but it's 110 degrees, gotta love D.C. summers, and I stand there listlessly with the hose for less than five minutes before retreating indoors. 

Or like this weekend, when I bought a lovely pot of thyme at the farmer's market but then forgot to plant it for a few days.  It's a little crispy on the edges now, and I'm not sure that it's going to recover. I may have planted dried thyme.

My garden grows in spite of my less-than-stellar efforts.  This year, however, it seems to be growing to spite me. 

The blackberry bush is angrily putting out tendrils in every direction, but is not interested in growing any juicy fruit for pies.  Did you know that blackberry leaves look a lot like poison ivy?  My mother and I had a long email correspondence on this subject at the beginning of the season.  The blackberry bush seems to know this though, and has produced hundreds of luxuriant green leaves guaranteed to keep and visitor to my backyard away from that corner of the garden. 

In addition to the blackberry busy, there are eggplants.  I take no responsibility for the eggplants because they were entirely my husband's idea.  The eggplants are right next to the blackberry bush and unfortunately do not get much more than 2-3 hours of sun per day.  In other words, not quite enough...  However, although two have withered, one industrious eggplant is using every ounce of its daily allotment sunlight to grow one eggplant.  I'm sure when it's finished it will be delicious. 

The tomatoes are doing a bit better, comparatively, but the problem there is the squirrels have already auctioned off all the green tomatoes to the highest squirrel bidder.  I hope I am able to wrench a few away from their greedy paws. 

The basil is great.  It just grows and grows and doesn't really mind what I do, or don't do.  I have a high regard for the basil. All I have to do is pinch the flowers off once a week.  That's the kind of gardening I can handle. 

Hanging out with the basil are the jalapeno peppers.  These are my husband's babies and they have produced dozens of spicy peppers.  He's very happy about this, and the rest of us, well, we're happy for him. 

There has been one definite success this year, the moon flowers.  They started out as a tiny transplant, a gift to the girls from my father in law and they have been phenomenal. I propped a small wooden trellis against the garden wall and they have just climbed right up.  No flowers yet, but we're checking for them every few days.

So this year is marked by few growing successes, but we sure are enjoying the fresh basil on our pizza.