Okay, so back to TomatoGate:
Um, “Spring Cleaning” was the first part, then “TomatoGate: An Introduction”, then “Freerangin’, Freeballin; and Flopsy-Flurvy”. So, this is, um, part four:
When I last felt like writing about tomatoes, I was talking about my crazy ADHD garden in which I decided to grow everything only to find out I had been allotted the following farmscape:
In this fifteen square foot Wonderland, I planted big tomatoes, little tomatoes, spring peas, pole beans, yellow squash, zucchini squash, carrots, spinach, mixed greens, cucumber, watermelon, strawberries, and, I think, a pumpkin. I figured I would maximize the vertical space.
I planted whatever had sprouted and tried to...
(Oh, and corn. I planted corn.)
arrange things in sort of a high/ low sort of way and then I threw everything that hadn't sprouted in like Jackson Pollock's Optimistic Garden Filler.
Everything was fine until it...wasn't. Plants were rising from the dead. Peas were coming up grody, and corn was coming up tougher than a kid from the Marcy Projects. Mixed greens were mixed in with everything else, and, you know, the pictures on those seed packets are illogically water-soluble. Like life in the Gummerdome, things were just too crowded.
The little tomatoes, on the other hand, were nuts. ("Nuts" like crazy nuts, not like nutty nuts... I don't know. You're just going to have to work through that yourself.) Anyway, so the baby toms were thriving. (Yes, Katy Perry, it was a lycopene dream.) They were all vining up the fence, and every few days, I would go outside and weavy-windy the vines into the fence and pretend it was a vineyard.
At that time, I was doing a little freelance special ed work. I had been asked to go out of town and provide respite care for about 24 hours, I knew The Gummer was going to her bad place. It's not OCD, per say. Not officially, anyway. She just gets really edgy before she has one of her Joan Crawford jags. It's like how some animals go apeshit before a storm. I could see it coming. I left.
When I pulled back into the driveway twenty-four hours later, my garden was gone.
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