I had to laugh to myself because on any given day*

Raise your hand if you knew this post was inevitable. Yeah, my hand is up too.

I am calling the garden a failure again this summer. This week I’ve pulled up the tomatoes and I transplanted the tarragon to the back herb garden. The basil is going like crazy so I need to process that into pesto or some sort of slurry so we can cook with it during the winter. You know you can grind up basil with water and then put them into ice cube trays, right? Slide cubes into tomato sauce and Shazzam! the flavor of summer basil.

I do have enough Fresno peppers that I’m going to attempt to make sriracha sauce. It calls for fermenting the peppers so unless we have an explosion or just funky ick, I hope to have sauce by the end of next week.

Now about the fail:
5 tomato plants yielded maybe 24 tomatoes. All small, but tasty enough.
2 eggplants yielded ZERO. One of the plants is still blooming so maybe I can expect a late season miracle.
2 cucumbers yielded less than 5 cucumbers.
1 bell pepper has yielded less than 10 peppers. Small but useable and tasted pretty good.
1 pepper plant with an unknown name yielded perhaps 24 peppers. They taste a lot like bell pepper. That’s probably a success.
2 Fresno peppers that I hope will yield enough to make that damn sauce that I mentioned above. I need 1 1/2 pounds. I’ve been throwing them into the freezer. We used a few right off the plant over the season, but not many. updated I don’t have 1 1/2 pounds. I have 10 ounces. AARRRRRGGHHHH!
1 thyme plant that died and 1 parsley plant that disappeared, presumed dead. We once had a parsley plant that grew in our orchard grass for more than one season. How does a parsley plant in a garden just disappear?

So, the fate of the garden is that we are planting 45 garlic bulbs this winter (ordered them from grey duck) and then that is it. No more. We’re going to pull up the fence except around the fruit vines/asparagus and that is the end of that.

By the way, I picked three acorn squash off the plant that grew out of the compost and trailed into the weeds/grass at the edge of the yard. One looks like something you’d buy at the grocery store and the other two are a little bit orange and let’s say unique. I’m sure all three will be tasty. But, seriously. That plant grew in a compost heap and yielded better than stuff in the actual garden. GAH.