unruly

It's the eleventh of August and my garden is unruly this morning.  Or it was unruly until I spent an hour or more with some polyethylene twine—it doesn't stretch—adding extension poles to the tomato stakes and tying back the heavy, perennial sunflowers that flop over and completely block the rear pathway each year.  By the time I finished making the garden navigable again, the sun had burned off the morning haze and I was sweating.  We had some flash floods yesterday, i.e. a lot of much needed water, and so this morning was the perfect morning, cool and moist, to set out my fall crops: cabbages, mustard, tat soi, and broccoli.  They're only a couple inches high now, but hopefully they'll be mature when I return from New Mexico in late October.  We'll see.

         
Here's the rear pathway.  From the looks of it, I'll need to get out my knife and mow the grass again.  The path is too narrow for my push mower to squeeze through.  

And here is a rutabaga leaf.  I wear a size 10 shoe.  Obviously, though, in this case I am not wearing any shoes at all.  I used to be a person who always wore shoes, but now I only wear them when necessary.  Sometimes I even remove them while driving on the highway, which I know is illegal.  Or at least that's what I've heard.  

I forget what kind of tomatoes these are.  There is a farmer who sells starts—there are many of them actually, but there's one that I really like—and I just tell him what qualities I'm looking for and to what use I will put my tomatoes (mostly sauce), and he chooses my tomatoes for me.  These two tomatoes are starting to blush.  Right before a tomato is about to turn red, it first turns this luminous yellow-green, which I happen to think is more exciting and lovely than when they actually turn red.  I don't know if "blushing" is common parlance, but it should be if it's not.  

Finally, the pathway on the opposite side of the garden: you can see that it too is quickly becoming impassable.  I don't think I've used that path in over a week.  Earlier in the year I would use it as a short-cut when carrying the watering can to the far end of the garden.  Now I have to go clear around the front and use the sidewalk, a much less interesting and much less direct route.  Anyhow, the corn is well past ripe now and starting to turn yellow.  I'm not going to cut it down.  As my fall crops grow, my corn will die.  When I come home from New Mexico, it's gonna be really dead.  Dead as a doornail, as they say, and full of hard corn kernels if the birds don't take their fill.