Tales from the Garden.

It's summer and my garden is working hard to make me proud.  And I'm incredibly proud.  As proud as a human can be of a living entity that has no soul, but that's a deeper discussion that's never going to see the pages of this blog.

I have had another encounter of the rodent kind, which apparently means that somewhere, rodents are mounting another offensive on me and my garden.  They're like insurgents.  Anyway, I came home from Zambia and discovered not only the Tomato Tangle, but something eating away on my green tomatoes.  I fought it mentally for a couple of days, but when I finally found a rat dropping, that was it.  The gloves were back on.  Total side note- is anyone else disturbed by the fact that I'm becoming somewhat knowledgeable about the poop in my garden?  Hmmm, these are definitely caterpillar poopers.  But these are too small to be rat- could they be large caterpillars?  Perhaps I should work more...

Back to the ongoing saga of the Rat Wars... I put out my last two snappy traps with some mozzarella and hoped for the best.  The next morning, I went outside to snip some rosemary and casually checked the trap.  Sweet mother of pearl!!- I had caught me a rat.  It was dead, which increased the creepy factor to at least an 11 on a scale of 10.  But I won!  Yay fun!  Always a wise woman, my mother gently warned me that where there's one, there's two rats.  And those two are probably a male and female, and that means LOTS of rats.  Thanks mom.

So, the Tangle is chugging along unchecked by rodents.  Christy, my vacation caretaker, told me that she was able to take a few tomatoes while I was gone and she said they were remarkably good, so I can't wait to try them.  I got some pretty big ones waiting that need to hurry up and ripen already.  My cherry tomato plants are doing great too.  I pick about 5 off every day, so I'm collecting for a big summer salad this weekend.  Here is a picture of the Tomato Tangle, in all its glory:

Yep, that's all one plant there in the middle.  I'm awesome.

I also came home to a cucumber plant that has gotten its act together!  Today, I picked my first cucumber and tried it.  It's so good.  So fresh.  Plus it was with smug pride that I got to walk past the cucumbers at Trader Joe's today.  And since I'm a dork, here's my first cucumber:

Everything else is plugging along.  I constantly have lettuce and spinach on hand for salads.  My jalapeno and serrano pepper plants are shooting out peppers all over the place.  Spicy.  And in a new development, my guava tree, after about 3 years of taking up space and uncommon neglect from me, is creating fruit this summer.  More as the situation develops.

I think I need to work more.  I'm in my garden too much.