GARDEN POST, YARDEN POST!! (Patreon)

After two weeks of unchecked growing, I came home to this caved-in monstrosity:

A week before I left, it looked like:

Okay, the magical sunlight is a little unfair for comparison. Anyway I'm glad I backed up the archway with a giant bamboo tripod before I headed out!

I asked Luke for garden photos while I was away, but he insisted that photos don't do it justice, and he's right. For example, here's the whole thing a couple days ago:

... and it does not feel this small in person.

Luckily this photo CLEARLY shows you how ridiculous Girlboss Sunflower here looks compared to everything that's NOT ten feet tall. Those zinnias next to her are up to my chest, but still no match for Her Majesty.

(Queen Bee finally half-opened today!! And it turns out she is a TINY sunflower, which I foolishly did not expect. Like a big tall dude with a teeny weeny head.)

My herbs and peppers are currently KILLING IT:

The front half is all peppers, back half is basil and mint and a lil cilantro and some rogue dinosaur kale near the center. I never take photos of them, but behind all of this are two garden boxes full of parsley and dill and thyme, too. Here's a montage of some edible things:

Bottom center tomatoes are called Chocolate Sprinkles and I think they're real cute! 

I'm only growing smaller tomats this year, since Luke decided to get on this Garden Freak Train and went from four untended tomato plants to TEN TOMATO PLANTS in cages with a fence around it. He is rich in the devil's apple right now. I think he's made a new tomato recipe for dinner every night this week.

Here's the back of my garden:

You can't tell, but a hoard of brassica-loving bugs made an all-you-can-eat buffet out of my kale and decimated a third of the plants. Our participants include cabbage worms (green), cabbage loopers (white & black) and harlequin beetles:

It was a real party while I was away! The best way to crash this party is to "manually remove the bugs and their eggs" so guess what I did for two hours yesterday.

Turns out they do not like to bathe! So if you drop them into a little soapy water, they will no longer be accepted as members of the Kale Klub. (I apologized to every single one as I dropped them to their deaths.)

On a brighter note, my cantaloupe-deserve-to-sit-on-chairs idea? Totally worked. I've got a few baby 'loupes growing off the chairs, and this medium-sized sucker is right below one of the legs:

My zucchini plants utterly tanked so I pulled both of them. Dunno what got to them, but that was my final attempt (same thing happened last year). No more squash in the yarden!

The main plant that's lording over the ghoulish entrance to my garden is WAY too many Chinese Long Beans, which are green beans that are just extremely long. Pop off two or three of these and you've got yourself a whole meal!

(Locals, if you love green beans or basil or jalepeños, hit me up, I'll be your own personal farmer's market.)

One last GIF to show you last year's garden in July (tripod photo), this year's garden in June (lovely arch photo), and this year's garden in July (busted arch + tripod photo).

Thank you, as always, for humoring me and my new obsession that I show people photos of now instead of showing them photos of my cats. 

Peas (and beans) be with you!