• The Amistad Revolt by Iyunolu Folayan Osagie
• Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

It has been the better part of a year since my last gardening update and once again the rainy season is upon us, so it is time to let you all know where things stand. The dry season was actually pretty good for the garden. The disadvantage of the dry season is that you have to water the garden yourself, so that’s a morning chore I had to accomplish the whole time. The advantage of the dry season though is that many plants don’t actually like having gigantic deluges dropped on them every day, so a lot of stuff grew really well. The picture above is probably the garden at its peak. As covered in the previous post there are some additional garden boxes but they were trying to grow brussels sprouts which never gave us any sprouts for reasons I am too lazy to even google. But the above boxes gave us some pretty alright harvests. The chives and green onions grew well, though a bit slowly, and we have still a good garden bed of mint my super amazing wife likes to make into tea. And then our single most successful crop was basil, which grew really well in this climate. We made a lot of pesto. Some of our other harvests are below, which included calendula, purple green beans, and about a half dozen total cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes just didn’t grow well.

The two plants I have tended to the most though are the trees I am growing, below. On the left is an avocado tree that I seeded and has shot up. It’s getting to be almost as tall as I am and I am excited for it to be taller than I am. There is also my little lime tree. Both of these trees I grew from seeds from fruits that we had bought so that is neat. I am a bit confused as to why the lime tree is still looking more like a short lime bush, but again I am too lazy to google like, lime tree lifecycle. I just like growing fruit trees even if I’ve never managed to keep one alive long enough to actually see them bear any fruit. But someday somebody will get fruit from these trees and that is neat.

We have not been the only ones enjoying the garden. Thankfully we haven’t had too many pests of the type that will actually eat plants, but we’ve had some visitors. The bird below acted a bit suspicious but I don’t think ate anything. And if the rather large spider ate anything I don’t mind because we aren’t eating the same things. I had to remember to not walk through that web though because for sure that spider would have eaten me.

As stated above it’s now rainy season and a lot of the plants don’t really like all the rain. Although the beans and the mint do well the basil we were using so much of absolutely just wilted under the rain. That’s fact one. The other fact you have to know is that we have a gardener and our neighbors have a different gardener. I think our gardener gets jealous of the other gardener. We really hired our gardener just to mow the lawn, and him working on the garden is just a bonus thing on top of the lawn. The neighbors though, they have a much smaller lawn and also give their gardener more leeway. And the neighbors’ gardener shows up seems like 2-3 times a week, whereas we only have ours come once. All this to say that the neighbors’ garden, although not as big, is much more lush and has a wider variety of plants. I think this makes our gardener jealous. Often when the neighbors garden gets some feature I’ll discover our gardener has done the same to ours.

Which brings us to the most dramatic events of the past week. One solution to “the plants don’t like all the rain” is to build a shelter over the garden. Our neighbors’ gardener had built a little hut over their garden and put a tarp over it to shelter it from the rain. So our gardener started talking about doing the same. We were enthusiastic about this, for the sake of the basil. Except a couple things. One is that it took us too long to get our act together and the basil was pretty much done for anyway. The other is that by the time we got our act together our neighbors’ garden shelter had collapsed because the rain was too much for it. This was not going to show our gardener up. He was undaunted. He was not only undaunted, he was like, taking this as an opportunity to shine. The neighbors’ structure fell down because it was too weak, our gardener explained to me. We would do better. Still I was surprised to come home one day to find the man constructing the absolutely giant canopy pictured above. It was a very robust structure. The picture above was taken last Tuesday, when it was brand new. But alas, the picture below was taken last night. The poor thing didn’t even last a week. It’s not our gardeners’ fault, his structure held up beautifully. But the tarp failed. The tarp I chose. So I have let my gardener down and I don’t know how I will face the man on Tuesday, when he comes again. But I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, basil RIP.