Grow Some Funk Of Your Own

The gardens look pretty good this season. They looked great in June but then we harvested most of the original crops and some of the new things we planted didn't grow so well.
This year we tried some new vegetables in addition to the onions that we planted last fall - which turned out to be garlic.
We weren't above taking donations from friends. Carolyn's tomatoes and peppers did well and for the first time ever we grew decent basil from plants Carolyn passed along. Shawna's Swiss chard grew fabulously. The lettuce seeds we saved after letting the lettuce bolt and go to seed on purpose last year grew better than the new seeds I bought.
We tried a different variety of carrots. A shorter variety. Perhaps you saw them at the county fair - they won a blue ribbon. C was crushed to learn that he wasn't old enough to enter an exhibit in the fair's youth exhibits. You have to be eight. His reaction to this news was, "Eight is almost a grown up!" And so we entered the carrots and just like Mike Phelps, though without much chance of future product endorsements, they they brought hold the gold.
There were, however, some set backs.
I picked all the kale from our community garden plot and gave three quarters of it to the service center. The rest I brought home but accidentally left in the car for four hours, rendering it lifeless. I suppose it's better than leaving a twin in the car but nonetheless I was disappointed to be out a big bowl of kale soup.
Rabbits infiltrated the community garden fence. They ate all the buds off my purple bush beans and all the leaves off my cabbage plants.
This summer I learned that if I read the package of seeds carefully, maybe next summer I won't mistake bush beans for pole beans. I kept planting rows of beans in the back yard and not understanding why they kept sending out all these shoots, grabbing on to each other, and becoming hopelessly tangled.

song: Grow Some Funk of your Own • artist: Elton John