Everyone is wearing costumes because tomorrow is Halloween, and I just discovered the last two tomatoes from the garden. They were hiding under some bananas and not looking too good, so I composted them. The garden has baffled me this year.
The mums only just started to bloom. They are sold as annuals in big pots at every grocery store and the occasional gas station, and they turn brown and die back to the ground over winter. A few years ago I saw some sprout back in the spring and realized they are actually perennials. That’s the sort of research I do for gardening, which partly explains how so much stuff in my garden dies.
The tomatoes grew from fruit that fell off last years plants. It was a very romantic notion to me, and it yielded a terrible crop this year. Or maybe the weather did.
The trumpet vine barely blossomed, which annoys me because this stuff grows along the highway in massive, bright orange and yellow displays.
One of the kids brought home three tiny, nondescript sprouts in a paper cup of soil for Mother’s Day. We planted it and one of the three sprouts survived. It turned out to be a zinnia, which grew like a weed and has been blooming with unnaturally pink flowers for months now. It’s covered in powdery mildew, an ugly but harmless fungus that we know about from a few years ago when we had a full bed of zinnias.
They came out this year and I put the tomatoes there instead. I should probably start taking better notes on the garden.