Garden Update: A Tale of Two Sides

It's that time of year - are you all successfully ducking your coworkers/neighbours/church friends/family who are trying to gift you with zucchini and tomatoes and cucumbers and all the rest of their garden plenty?

Alas,there is no ducking required on my part. Apparently I know no one with garden plenty.

Including me, more's the pity.

Since we last left our garden, we've had some successes and failures. The basil on the porch is looking pretty good (especially since it hasn't had much rain and its pot doesn't hold a whole lot of water):

Ditto on the mint. Although apparently this stuff is pretty hard to kill.

Behold my overflowing patch of lettuce and spinach:

My voluminous kale on the left and my cornucopia of zucchini on the right:

The Girl's proliferating green onions, towering dill, and bountiful peas:

The Boy's sky-high stalks of corn and bean poles groaning with the weight of their largesse:

Okay, so it hasn't been a year of plenty for us. I think the biggest issue is that I completely underestimated how quickly raised beds dry out. I've been watering them, but it's been so unbelievably hot this summer. Days and days of 30 degrees, sunny, no rain.

*Awesome* if you're the girl who has to do the mowing (I think I've done it twice since the end of June), but less awesome on the produce front.

I'd say that this picture captures the state of the garden at the back of the house - a bit green, mostly brown, bedraggled. Even the dwarf has capitulated.

But! Check out the other side of the house:

Red and rosy and juicy and soooo delicious. My tomatoes are doing quite well, if I do say so myself:

Not to be outdone by the peppers - not many of them, but they're lookin' good:

Now I know most gardeners will demur and say, "oh, Mother Nature did the hard work - all I did was help them along a bit."

Not I - what you are beholding is the work of that mighty goddess of fertility, Peitricia "Tomato Whisperer" Mae. My tomatoes weren't coming, nor my green peppers, and my hair stylist (that deep repository of green thumb wisdom) suggested that maybe the bees weren't doing their thang.

You know - that thing. Ferrying pollen. You know - flower S-E-X.

I realized I hadn't seen many bees around. Partly because I have zero flowers this year.

So I took matters into my own hands, and me and my Q-tip and my tomato buds had ourselves a little IVF party.

And, as witnessed above, it TOTALLY worked.