369. Trips to Win

The weather has been ideal the last few days - lows in the 60s, highs in the 80s. The mercury is scheduled to climb a wee bit as this week proceeds, but there can't be any complaints, especially after the heat of the last few days of July and the first few of August. It is currently 82 degrees and beautiful.

One of the things I haven't written about this year is my garden - or if I have I've already forgotten. In years past, in houses past, I've had nice gardens, and relatively nicely-sized gardens for the very small city-sized plots of ground I've lived upon, the plots usually covering about 1/10 to 2/10 of a acre at most - the gardens covering maybe a 10 x 10 or 10 x 15 foot area. I had not had a garden since leaving my Ellison Avenue home in 2005, where I had flowers in the front and vegetables in the back.

Back when I lived on Lee Avenue is Camp Taylor - my first home other than the one I grew up in - where I lived seventeen years and which is still in my possession, the entirety of the garden was in the front since the back yard was a pie shaped quarter acre piece of ground going for the most part straight up hill. There I had flowers for nine out of twelve months and pepper and tomato plants lined the right side side of the driveway. I was in a polite but unspoken competition with my neighbor across the street, Mr. Widman, about who got the earliest tomatoes. The secret was to have them in the ground by Derby Day so as to have them on the table by the Fourth of July. Neither of us ever acknowledged the competition outright, but we both watched the other's garden's progress with a keen eye. The one thing I did let grow fairly wild in the back yard were pumpkin plants, whose strands of vines took off all across the hillside, and sometimes well into my neighbors' back yards. Where I am now, in a complex of townhomes and six-plex apartment buildings, outdoor gardens are discouraged. They may even be prohibited. Nonetheless, I have one.

Outside my back door, and off to the left of my little eight-foot-square patio is an even smaller garden. It is comprised of one tomato plant, one pepper plant, one banana pepper plant, and one sprout of kale. There is also one of those old fashioned concrete trough-style planters which has about ten pepper plants growing in it, sprung from seeds I had saved from several years ago. There are also several planters gracing the patio in which, if one were to look closely, one might note wryly there is nothing growing. The whole garden proper covers maybe 20 square feet, which works out to about 46/100,000th of an acre. An enterprising real estate agent would euphemistically call is "just under an acre."

I miss my bigger gardens and hope someday to have a respectable garden of perhaps a quarter acre or more - of flat land, not a hillside as I did in Camp Taylor. Toiling in the garden is great for the psyche, pretty good as exercise (which I otherwise do not get), spiritually uplifting, and the reward is knowing that here is something produced by me with the admirable help of God and Mother Nature, who sometimes work in tandem and sometimes don't. Sun and Rain and Wind are nice up to a point. I have to say this year's work on my miniature farmstead has thus far been enjoyable.

I've harvested four banana peppers thus far and nothing more. I expect to have tomatoes enough for me and maybe one friend, and peppers in a like quantity. The pepper plants in the concrete planter are for show only - no fruits are expected from that. Sometime late next month, it is my intention to bury some bulbs along the perimeter of the fence around the eight-by-eight patio in the hopes of seeing flowers from them late next winter and early next spring. We'll see how that goes.

That's all for now. By the way, today's title really has nothing to do with this entry's content. But I did think it was appropriate for this entry.

Enjoy the week.