I recently celebrated a birthday and my friends got me the coolest garden sculpture ever.

I will soon be planting cilantro seeds on top. We’ll see how these fare!

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I went away for two weeks with nothing but a timed soaker hose to attend to my garden.

Upon my return, the black-eyed peas had taken over.

They breached the wooden boundaries of the plot , they covered my chili bushes, they used the dead sunflower corpses as a jungle-gym.

They are everywhere: on the ground, climbing, circling. I’m afraid to delve too deep into the pea abyss, it’s very likely something could be living under there.

I’m hoping for a black-eyed pea bounty!

Funny thing is, I didn’t plant melon this year.

Right now, my garden is a mix of thriving and dying.

Thriving: Black-eyed peas

Dying: Sunflowers

Thriving: Mint

Dying: Cucumbers

While sometimes I feel like I’m garden failure — I do have some things growing at the moment. Some things that, if luck, pollinators, and weather align…I might be able to eat.

Here’s what’s growing now…

Corn…

Black-eyed peas…

Jalapeño…

Baby cucumber…

I am currently compost- less.

Last week  I added a bucket of food waste to my tumbler and spun. It remained motionless, so I gave it a good shove. It moved, but not in a way I expected.  The vessel bottomed out and half-rotted compost started spilling out onto the yard — and dangerously close to my sandaled feet.

My husband (thank God) was in the shower. If he encountered the sights and smells of the past 3 months of kitchen scraps — and our last haircut, he would surely gag…or worse. Food doesn’t just turn to dirt on its own. It’s helped along by chemistry, maggots, mold and a host of other un-pleasantries.

I grabbed a large bin and some garden gloves and started shoveling the worm-y mess as fast as I could.

So now I have a bin of half-composted food and a disabled tumbler in my backyard — and a giant bowl of scraps in my kitchen awaiting a receptacle.

I guess “knee high by Fourth of July,” is a saying there. Well my corn is going to be thigh high by the fourth of JUNE.

Here it is before:

Here it is now:

Sadly, it’s unlikely it will pollinate.  But still, it’s corn!

1) Throw it away

2) Compost it

3) Bury it.

I chose option 3.

I dug a hole, threw the potato in and have watered it deeply every few days.

Turns out, I did it all wrong. You’re actually supposed to plant the slips (or appendages). You cut them off of the sweet potato, and bury them with the part that was closest to the sweet potato down (that part grows the roots). I planted mine in hard ground. It likes a big mound of loose compost or dirt.

That said, it looks like in about 100 days  I still might have some sweet potatoes:

Or maybe it’s poison ivy…

As soon as temperatures got into the 90s, the lettuce in my salad table started tasting weird/wilting.

For the summer, I’m trying something new; Making my salad table into an herb table.

I just planted basil and mint.