What happened?

My husband came in this morning and said that he felt we might have placed the Grow Boxes too close. At the time we started the garden we thought we had good spacing. As is the rule with everything, it looks good on the front end and bad on the back end.

With the heat in the Greater Atlanta (Adlana as Southerners say) area, the back yard is beginning to resemble the rain forest of South America. The Purple Cherokee tomatoes, I estimate, are probably 45 inches tall. They are the tallest with the Pink Brandywines running a close second, and the Pinks are really strange looking plants.

The lime is doing the trick and we will continue to add lime during the summer to stop the blossom end rot. This is a problem when you have a lot of rain. I plan to add the eggshells to the peppers tomorrow and put up the bean tepees.

I had intended to tepee the beans over the weekend, but my husband insisted on priorities and he won. I now am back on track and it is critical that the beans get tepees. If I don't do it soon, the runners they are sending out might reach out and strangle us.

Since my husband has worked in the garden this year, we have made a concerted decision that this is our first and last year with the Topsy Turvy Tree. I have picked exactly two Juliet tomatoes and they weighed a mighty 1 ounce. That is pathetic.

In my garden, as with my children, if you are capable of producing results, then it is expected of you. Nobody told the Topsy manufacturers that it is against nature to keep a plant upside down when it is supposed to grow up. I think I could take those plants and put them in a Grow Box and they would be spectacular.

In my garden, it is produce or we will find another way to grow what we want to grow. Our discrimination is the same for a type of vegetable or flower. The Garden Patch people have a guarantee that their Grow Boxes will produce or you can return the boxes. That would mean I would have to hack my way through the growth and there is too much fruit on the plants to do that.

It is not that I did not research what grew best in the Topsy. I found that the people who were happy with Topsy had planted cherry type tomatoes. We did that and I know that some experiments just do not work. The garden is continually an exercise in experimentation.

So we have the perfect place for that darn Topsy thing and the trash pick up is in the morning.