Day: October 17, 2004

My Darwinian yard

Like the house I have gotten less involved with certain tasks. The garden. My philosophy, it grows cool, it doesn’t oh well. That’s why I plant certain tomatoes, or why I stick with peppermint and thyme and tried growing some other plants. They work. I now know passion flower grows like crazy, I shall grow it again next year.

Arugula. Arugula is what grew in my yard despite my refusal to pay it much attention. Actually it grew in a pot. I threw a bunch of seeds in for mixed salad greens in the Spring. The red leaf was wimpy and didn’t survive, there was some other green that just tasted fowl and I ripped that out of the pot. So I’m tasting and ripping whatever I don’t like out of the pot. I get to this funky green that is okay at first but has a bit of a bite and it is the only thing to survive. The rains watered it, ’cause heavens know I didn’t. Anyway, come Fall I revisit the pot and notice that the arugula has gone crazy, there are big chunks of this plant in my little pot, just overflowing, like it is trying to escape from the pot. So I have all these tomatoes, I serve the arugula in a salad. Not half bad, but I am still not fond of the bite. I tried cooking it like spinach, it was fine, no bite and it was a little like spinach, but not. I think I’ll grow this next year.

Tomatoes. The tomatoes have been very good to me, and like the arugula, I’ve ignored them as well. I didn’t water them much. I did pick off the tomatoes, and put up strink to support the vines, but not much else. I grow yellow tomatoes as the red ones don’t seem to flourish in my yard.

The tarragon also, despite my best efforts of ignoring it, also seem to want to keep growing. Anyone need tarragon? I don’t seem to cook with it and yet it still grows. It dies back every year and the darned herb keeps growing back.

Peppermint is a weed. It will grow. It will grow where you don’t want it to grow.

Unlike my neighbors who baby their plants, I semi-ignore mine. I will water when they are on the verge of death. I don’t feed them fertilizer. So what’s growing in my yard are the baddest mf plants on the block. They are tough. They are the fittest.