I suppose it’s time for a report on the garden. Isn’t that an enthusiastic beginning! It’s safe to say my enthusiasm about the garden has been wavering.

Let’s start with the okra. According to my plan and calculations, the first okra should have begun appearing the first week in May. Lo and behold, the okra has begun blooming, and there are, in fact, a couple of pods set on. Normally, this would be a cause for much jubilation, the taking of artistic photographs, gushing about the okra pods, and general gleeful excitement over everything going according to The Plan. I like things to go according to a well-thought out, fully-established, and written-out-in-detail plan^†. Yet, there is no jubilation over the okra. Even though I am seeing okra pods exactly when I expected to see them, I still have one nagging concern.

My okra plants are still only 5″-6″ tall. My knowledge of plant biology informs me that plants do not begin going to seed until they have matured, unless they are under stress. My okra plants cannot be mature. Therefore, they must be under stress. Ah, but I have an experiment set up specifically to test how okra grows under stress! When I thin plants, I put them in other pots, often crowded closely together. These become controls of a sort. I can compare the growth of that plant to the ones in the better bed growing situation. At the moment, I have two okra plants and a tomato plant growing in a 5 gallon pot. I mostly ignore them and often forget to water them. I only spray them for aphids if I haven’t run out by the time I get to them. All three of those plants should be stressed and showing signs of it. Yet both okra plants in that pot are taller than a foot, look lush and green, and have strong stems. I am befuddled by this development.

Next up is the peppers. They look like hell, and if they are three inches tall, I’d be amazed. They are 50 days old, and only 20 days from supposed maturity. I know they should be taller than this. Well, at least they aren’t trying to make peppers yet, so there is that.

I don’t even want to talk about the basil. I thought it was supposed to be easy to grow.

The corn is barely waist-high (on short little me) and yet it has tassels, and I can see the beginning of cob formation. Shouldn’t it be taller and this happening later? Oh, it’s totally on schedule. I was expecting to be eating corn the last week of this month. It looks like that might happen, but seriously, the plants seem terribly short.

In addition to the peanuts having peanut rust (a fungal problem), and they appear to be sterile. They bloom (right on schedule too), but the blooms never produce pegs and just drop off instead. It might have something to do with the rust. It might not. All I know is I will eventually be grumpy enough one day when I go out to the garden to pull them all up and call the peanut experiment over and failed. And … they seem small too.

The cucumbers too are beginning to fruit, and yes … they are half the height they should be.

Everything in my garden seems to be humming along right on schedule, only in miniature form. It all looks stunted and small. Well, the tomatoes not so much. I’m not unhappy with the tomatoes. But everything else? It just seems wrong. It feels wrong. There is something wrong in the garden.

Tomorrow, I am going to begin recording the sunlight position throughout the day. The only difference between the okra in the pot and the okra in the bed is the amount of sunlight. No one is starving for sunlight. Both beds get at least 8 hours a day, but the pots and the tomato bed get sunlight well into the evening. I’d think 8 hours a day would be enough for okra and cucumbers. Or for squash and corn, for that matter. Maybe not. Nothing I can do about it if it is a want for more sunlight. I’m not likely to suggest to Lin we need to chop down the big pecan tree any time soon. It’d be good to know for the future though, so I can plant things in that area accordingly. Still … 8 hours of sunlight should be enough, but I can find no other explanation for the pathetic size of the plants in that part of the garden.

Anyway, I am a bit disgruntled with the garden. It’s not the garden’s fault. The garden is doing just what it should be doing, and it’s sticking to The Plan. It’s doing the best it can. I have somehow failed to give the plants what they need to thrive, and I am sure the weather has played some part in the problem. We’ve had weird weather this spring. Well, not so much weird, but more like normal … only we haven’t had normal spring weather in ages. I’ve forgotten what it was like (wet and hot and humid). What I do know for certain is that tiny little plants already trying to produce fruit is sure to end in tears.

I am about to go Darwin on much of my garden. If this year’s garden has taught me anything, it’s been that sometimes you have to pull something up and throw it away without whining about it or feeling bad. Unfortunately, if I pulled up everything I am disgruntled with, I’d have very little garden left at all.

In better garden news, curiosity finally got the better of me, and I pulled up one of the smaller carrots. They are growing nicely, and the flavor is awesome. Also, the beans I planted the other day are sprouting. Yeah! I guess I should celebrate the few successes.

I’m going to go have some coffeecake and contemplate my gardening woes on the couch and maybe take a nap. Enough whining for now.

1. † By the way, I use red ink almost exclusively for all writing purposes. I am, in fact, agitated when I have to write something in blue or black. I even have a favorite brand of pen. The Bic stick pens –the clear ones, not the ugly white ones. I have preferred red Bic stick pens since I was a child. I have never put much thought into why I use red ink almost exclusively for all writing purposes. I’ve never psychoanalyzed it. I do know it’s annoying when an instance arises that requires the use of blue or black ink, it takes me an hour to find a working blue or black pen anywhere in the house. Anyway, it’s a weird quirk of mine. [↩]