Overdue and Overgrown Garden Post!!

How many times have I said "I'll show you my garden soon!" on Patreon now?? The problem is I keep taking photos for you and then everything changes and the photos feel outdated! Even sharing these photos feels like "aw man but everything looks different TODAY!"

If I keep waiting, you'll never see it. So here's my garden from a few days ago, BEFORE I weeded all the grass outta the kale and peppers:

See the ladder in the back, against the house? Remember the green beans I gave up on, then did a little autopsy on, and it turned out they were just starting to sprout, but stopped? I tossed them into that garden bed like Jack and the Beanstalk, not expecting three of them to thrive! Well, there they are.

The two little masses on either side of this corner are dahlias that I didn't expect to do well! Zinnias from my own seeds last year are in the middle (they, in fact, DIDN'T do well, but a few popped up!).

Here's the herb and flower corner:

The cats love this spot under the ENORMOUS cosmos (which JUST started flowering).

The wildflowers that popped out of what I expected to remain a pile of dirt ASTOUNDED me. My bouquets have been pretty explosive!

I planted the mint and nasturtium (the deep red ones in the center) intentionally, but I did NOT expect the others to do so well! This is the reason I bought 5,635 seeds last week.

Here's a bunch of detail shots...

I can't help myself with these morning glories, I let them take over. I'm still pruning them, but they're pretty powerful!

Four O'Clocks, gifted to me by my neighbor who had too many. They've grown to be as tall as my shoulders this year. Like morning glories, they close up when the sun's too bright, and come back in the late afternoon when they've got a bit of shade.

I planted ghost peppers this year! Luke confirms: THEY'RE PUNCHY. I grew up in a household that didn't even use black pepper, so I'm still working up a jalapeño tolerance. I planted one ghost pepper, one Thai dragon, two habaneros, two Hungarian wax peppers, two jalapeños, and two sweet peppers this year. I grow them all for Luke and my friends Jon and Amanda.

Those Hyacinth Bean plants that the deer chewed up? Well, the deer continues to chew them when I forget to spray them with cayenne pepper, but they're beasts! They keep growing around the chewed-up spots, and are now flowering!

You can just barely see how the flowers are making way for dark purple-red bean pods.

As always, I'm growing a butt-ton of kale. I just weeded and de-bugged this patch.

I LOVE nasturtium! If you can get past the brutal idea of eating a flower, they taste like arugula. I grew this Copper Sunset variant this year, and I'm growing them again next year for sure.

I grow nothing but cherry tomatoes now, after one year of bad normal-sized tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes are so much easier, and they're almost all meat & skin, AND you can snack on 'em super hard super easily. Also they look like THIS, come ON.

The little orange ones are my favorite kind, so I grew three plants this year. I also grew Juliet, two volunteers from my friend Pang's garden, and one called Matt's Wild Cherry that took over the entire corner of my fenced-in garden (if you scroll back up, it's the behemoth on the far right!).

Matt's Wild Cherry puts off a billion tiny little red tomatoes that are only about a half-inch big! Super cute. Definitely growing that one next year, too.

This was SUPPOSED to be a cherry tomato, but it was mislabeled (this has happened to me so many times now!). At least it's eye-catching with its crazy stripes.

My wax peppers grow STRAIGHT UP and once they get heavy enough, they hang down. I assume that's when you know you can pick 'em. I make up rules around here.

Teeny tiny Thai Dragon pepper!! You can see the little Matt's Wild tomatoes in the background, too.

I threw a few old wrinkly potatoes into Mark's garden in the back of the house on a whim. Mark's been super busy this year, so his garden was a bust - the deer snacked on everything. He decided to pull up whatever was left of the potato plants, and go figure, there were like eight potatoes hiding in the dirt!

The hairy stuff is dried fennel and dried dill. Gonna use the dill to make a dill-icious potato salad today. And also...

... ginger pear cookies. :)

Thanks for your patience with me as I work on Secret Sandbox Project, and getting ahead on Elephant Town over here!!