We, two Defector gardeners, are here to update you with our accomplishments and failures.
Kelsey’s Garden Update
This year, I planted three cherry tomato plants and one heirloom tomato plant. In addition to these, my garden is full of perennials. I have lavender and rosemary and thyme and oregano that all come back on their own in addition to a blackberry bush that has never once produced fruit, and a bunch of local pollinator flowers. I also have three rose bushes which sit in front of my house and are in their infancy. On the first warming days of spring, my heart flowered with optimism. I gave everyone delicious fertilizer. I was blessed when a basil plant magically appeared in the garden bed with the tomatoes. I watched the slightly older rose bush bloom with its first flowers. The Earth, I thought was full of magic and wonder.
And boy was I wrong! Lies! Deception! Hurt!
The rest of the summer, I was tormented by my garden. After blooming once, the roses never bloomed again. They grew, but produced no flowers. The cherry tomato plants (which I have historically had no problems with at all) managed to produce a total of one dozen tiny tomatoes which didn’t even taste that good. The lavender did not flower. One of my scarlet honeysuckle plants just straight up died in July for no reason at all!
The worst part, is that I don’t even know what happened. I didn’t really do anything different. I watered the plants the same (maybe slightly less because there was a lot of rain this year). I kept them in their same spots where they should have theoretically received the same amount of sun.
To add insult to injury, in the past two weeks, my garden has hurt me even more. First, the big tomato plant magically produced one tomato. But now it is not hot, so it has just hung there not ripening for weeks. AND THEN, my neighbor tried to pull down some of the ivy off the wall and she pulled too hard and it all came down and in the process it accidentally broke two of my herb pots. Cursed year for my garden! Fuck you, see you next spring.
Albert’s Garden Update
Last year I planted more things than I wound up having energy or attention to care for adequately, and wound up frustrated and discouraged by the whole thing, and without much by way of delicious produce to show for it. Plus, last year I fucked up the initial planting of my tomatoes, just from being inattentive and sloppy: I planted them too shallow in their gigantic pots, instead of burying their lower stems, so it took forever for them to develop a lot of roots, and I wasted a lot of water keeping them hydrated when they could only drink from the top few inches of their soil. It stank!
So this year I intentionally scaled back my ambitions: Instead of my usual bunch of tomato plants and pepper plants and herbs, I just planted two indeterminate tomato plants and nothing else, so that I’d have more bandwidth to baby them along (and because let’s face it, tomatoes are the garden plants I care about the most). And I planted those babies deep, with rich, well-fertilized soil, and I watered those suckers in there real good, and I stationed them in the sunniest spot, and for their (figurative) infancy I babied them so intently and indulgently. More than I ever babied my own damn human children.
And for it I got: Dick!
I don’t know what happened, and it honestly kind of freaks me out. The plants just … never flourished. Their leaves stayed small, and sparse, and they grew slowly, and they put out few flowers, and the flowers produced slow-growing, fucked-up-looking, bad little tomatoes. They never came close to becoming healthy, vibrant, productive tomato plants! Ever! By the first of August I’d fully given up on them.
Here is the really fucked-up part. A few feet away from those two plants, there was a pot that last year had a tomato plant in it and this year had nothing but some hard, dry, worn-out old soil. And in like mid-June, out of nowhere, suddenly this soil, to which I had done nothing, had a lovely, healthy, deep-green little volunteer tomato plant growing out of it. It made the other two, which I’d planted more than a month earlier, look like tumbleweeds by comparison. So at a certain point I was like, Screw it! I will simply take care of this plant, even though it is way behind schedule to produce any tomatoes by Tomato Time, and I will count any tomatoes I get out of it as basically found money! So I cared for it, which really just amounted to watering it when we had several scorching dry summer days in a row … and it immediately withered. It produced zero tomatoes.
And let me just say—less, I promise, as a way of vindicating my gardening skills or whatever than to illustrate why this has all freaked me out—that I have planted and tended dozens of tomato plants over the years, and have harvested probably close to a hundred ripe, delicious tomatoes right out of the exact configuration of pot and soil and location where these plants, as well as last year’s plants, all failed. Ordinarily I am if anything perhaps too eager to accept my own incompetence as the explanation for why anything in my life goes bad, but this is kind of spooky. I cannot deny that there is a little voice at the back of my head whispering that I am beholding the little toe of a vast Climate Doom—that like 10 years from now my kids will be telling some other grimed survivors about how in retrospect the first signs of The Great Death were when their dad suddenly couldn’t grow tomatoes anymore.
Anyway in our elongated summers the tomatoes would be good as hell right now if I had any. I have none. It sucks man!
