I do not have a green thumb.

There’s near audible weeping and “someone tell my seeds I love them…” echoes from my shopping cart as I wander through nurseries. I am the the Grim Creeper. I mean, I’ve killed aloe plants, people.
And yet, our garden is thriving this year through no help of mine.

We have oregano, thyme, and rosemary on demand which, I’ll admit, is a pretty low (salad) bar to get over.

Sadly, a cool snap combined with a hungry animal of some sort (I blame Chuck) took out our basil plant. It’s on our garden-y agenda to replace it, along with the lettuce heads that we’ve already gone through.

Yes. We’ve been pulling fresh lettuce almost daily for our dinner salads, and it’s a fantastic reminder of just how good home-grown vegetables are. Produce picked up at a farmer’s market, usually relatively fresh, still tastes watery and flash-frozen when compared to walking outside, plucking leaves off a live lettuce plant, and then walking it back in to rinse and drop into a salad bowl.

Our tomatoes, on the other hand, have struggled a little so far. They too were caught in the late cold snap and we weren’t sure if they were going to make it. But they’ve proven resilient.

Oh, the tomato cages… Right. Let’s talk about tomato cages for a moment.

If you ever encounter a man who’s trying to persuade you that the round, flat part of a tomato cage goes on the ground…

Ignore him. He has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, even if he’s rather convincing in his misguidedness.

It also turns out that inverted tomato cages are not a hill that this man’s wife was willing to fight on. Despite being quite correct that they were installed upside-down, she wisely handwaved the entire proceedings with an, “Okay, sweetie. However you want them.“

It wasn’t until a week later that a neighbor came by, mentioned the tomato plants were coming along fine, then asked when exactly we planned on flipping the cages right-side-up.

And I was totally wrong. Of course the spikes go into the ground and the round part goes on top.

Moving on… Strawberries!

The strawberries are doing much better this year, which is a good thing since I nearly tore out the failed-yet-ridiculously-expensive ones that we purchased from Grime Nursery last year. They rung us up for like $8 per plant. Even the cashier was shocked when the owner told her the cost of an individual plastic pot, with a solitary strawberry plant in it. So much so that she had to ask again. (“Eight dollars…for each of them?”)

The easing of the torrential downpours that we saw throughout most of last summer has undoubtedly helped them as well. That goes for the garden as a whole.

Our corn is coming along well too.

At least, I think it is.

This is only our second attempt at corn. Last year I planted a few rows, although I didn’t do so in a raised bed since, I mean, corn grows everywhere! There are fields and fields of the stuff. It’s gotta be a super easy crop to grow…right?
Wrong.
Nothing happened but a bunch of vaguely row-shaped and well-watered weeds.
That said, corn does look an awful lot like grass when it sprouts. So it’s entirely possible that I weed whacked my own corn crop, half-assed Field of Dreams style.

Which brings us handily to the last bit I wanted to mention about my farming misadventures…I don’t know my asparagus from a hole in the ground.

I mean, I’ve no clue what corn sprouts look like (Corn Pops, however, I can spot from 500 yards), nor tomato sprigs, nor spinach seeds (they’re apparently spiky?), nor any edible plants. Nurseries could sell me poison oak and castor beans and I wouldn’t know until I’d “harvested” them and ended up in an oatmeal bath with ricin poisoning.

And so I use PictureThis!, which is an iPhone app that can identify plants for me. (Reminder: I am not sponsored by anyone. I genuinely use, and pay the annual cost, for this application.) And it’s been ridiculously helpful.
Case in point: yesterday I was on my way out to “pull weeds” from the barrel where I’d been growing our pansies.

And this is what it looked like yesterday.

The thing is, I’d also dropped some sunflower seeds in there since I figured the pansies wouldn’t last long into the summer/autumn. But as I stood there, blinking at this Barrel o’ Plant, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea which of these were sunflowers and which were weeds.

So I snapped a few shots into the plant identification app and it confirmed that the tall ones were, as I suspected, sunflowers:

So I was just about to start yanking everything that didn’t look like the above when I figured, “eh…I wonder what these things are? Maybe they’re wildly successful pansy leaves?“

Not so much. Turns out they’re…

I have no idea how so many tomato plants ended up erupting out of that thing. My only guess is that they were stowaways in the compost that I used to fill the barrel, and have happily taken up residence in there. At this point I guess we’ll see how well they do…

With or without the upside down cages.

j.s.