Eat the View: Part 5, “Rise of the Word Garden”

Every morning I get up at 5am and go out to the back yard to water my vegetable plants. Living in the North West means that we actually have day light at that hour, it’s not much but it keeps me from stubbing my toes. My plants all loved the heat wave we had a few weeks ago making them all double in size. I had hoped that would mean tomatoes soon, but then the cool down back to normal temperatures quickly dismissed that idea.

As one might imagine, I check out my plants every morning as I’m giving them their drink of water. I have had about half a dozen or so snow peas to harvest on my snow pea plant every day and my cherry tomato plant has tiny green tomatoes on it. The problem is because our temperatures have gone back to their normal range of the 70’s it is not really warm enough for the tomatoes to finish ripening. So, I wait. Watching and hoping. I know sooner than I believe I will have more tomatoes than I know what to do with, but a part of me feels a little like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka jumping up and down and screaming “I want it now!” I’m still learning that I can’t rush nature.

ShoeDiva came over on Sunday night to have dinner watch the season premiere of True Blood and in the down time between eating and the show starting we sat out in the garden with a bottle of “3 Buck Chuck” and began to talk. Like they say, one thing led to another, and we ended up naming all of the plants in my garden. We stayed with a theme of author names and tried to match them with the plant’s characteristics (did I mention there was a bottle of wine involved?): my two zucchini plants ended up with the names Poe and Wilde, the snow peas are Hemingway, the strawberry plants are Dr. Suess, my Shady Lady tomato plant is Plath, and the basil is Doyle. The list goes on, but I won’t venture to try to remember all of them. Being the intelligent ladies that we are, because we don’t want me to forget all of these fabulous titles we have bestowed upon these plants we wrote the names on popsicle sticks and put them in the soil next to the plant. Now I’ll never forget that my Lemon Verbena plant has been dubbed Lincoln Steffens.