The garden may have gotten a little out of hand this year, with all the rain we've had. The sorghum is twice my height and beginning to ripen, though I find it's extremely hard to hull. I may just leave the hulls on and keep it for future chicken feed. I also had the idea of planting a grove of it by our church to provide shade, as it grows like a drought-tolerant bamboo. The canes can be pressed for syrup, but since I don't own a cane press, I'll just use them as poles.
The garden has been overrun with sunflowers, volunteers from seeds the birds scattered last year. Some are small and delicate and I don't recall ever planting them in the past, but here they are, full and healthy. The cherry tomatoes have done well, but the larger tomatoes are still green, and other gardeners I've talked to have found the same thing. The cucumbers were so-so, not as prolific as last year, the green beans didn't do much, and some of them just bloomed and bloomed but didn't produce beans, which is weird, because they don't tend to require pollinators. The cabbages are scrawny, the green onions are massive, the zucchini were a disappointment, the peas never even surfaced (squirrels?), but the dry beans have been prolific. The carrot seeds I planted were from a neighbour, who forgot to tell me they were for multi-coloured carrots, which turned out to be a happy surprise. The raspberries are flourishing this year. It's been a great year for collecting seeds of all types. And best of all, the garlic turned out the size of baseballs, absolutely the best I've grown in my life. So the garden has its compensations!
I was talking to my husband about the not-so-great-over-all yield this year, and I realized that food production is only about 75% of the purpose of my garden. The other 25% is for mental health, just the sheer joy of being outdoors, in nature, watching abundance emerge.
