This Year's Gardens: Part 3

My last garden update was about four weeks ago. My, how the time flies. And yes, there is activity in the gardens!

I am starting to see the first tomatoes. The peppers are thriving; so are the red cabbages. (As well as the broccoli and cauliflower.) The zucchini are starting to spread their leaves.

The first sowing of basil was pretty much a disaster, as in "nothing happened." I wasn't even sure I wanted to try it again. But I did: I resowed the bed, announcing to Warren that if this didn't work, I would just buy basil at the Farmers Market to make pesto this year. (Well, that and the two basil plants I bought as a pitiful backup.) 

It worked, apparently. It seems I will have a basil crop after all! 

The basil is coming up!

The all-star in the vegetable gardens this year is the Trail of Tears pole beans. They are already reaching new heights and tomorrow I will be crafting more routes for them to spread up and over.

The pole beans reaching for the sky

My biggest surprise? Last year, I sprouted and planted four small patches of globe thistle from seeds I had harvested the previous fall from a healthy patch just down the street. I got nothing; the starts all withered away. So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I was doing some light weeding in one of the front beds and came across something that looked kinda sorta familiar. It was one of the patches of globe thistle, making an appearance this year!

Globe thistle! 

I am having some serious conversations (with myself, with Warren, with a few others) about how much capacity I have in terms of time and energy, both physical and mental. My capacity impacts what I do, have to do, want to do, am willing to do. Yes, all IS stable in Cancerland, but I have no illusions about how far out I am on the survival spectrum (way out there) and how much my body has endured over the last 19 years. So seeing this plant, which I had given up for lost, come up unexpectedly, gave me a little boost. I still have a lot of thinking to do and I may be writing about some of that in the weeks to come, but for now I am looking forward to seeing the globe thistle bloom.