Welcome to the Jungle

This post brought to you by the snarky comment Ryan made about how I should take more pride in my garden, and would I take pictures of the current weed-grown state and put it on my blog? He didn't think so. To which I said "pish," and to prove that I meant "pish," I hereby present a 100% honest nothing-hidden-with-clever-camera-angles post about exactly how overgrown my garden is.

The jungle

There comes a point in every gardener's summer, I believe, when "well-tended" stops being the goal and "damage control" becomes all one can hope for. I reached that point a few weeks ago, and to justify this event, I will enumerate a few facts:

1) I'm pregnant
2) and tired all the time
3) and sensitive to the heat now
4) and prone to dizzy spells in the heat
5) and our average daily temperature has been bloody hot
6) and I have a baby around whose naps I have to schedule my day
7) and we have a really big garden
8) and just getting it all watered is a pretty big chore
9) and I'm pregnant
10) and have I mentioned that it's bloody hot?

So my MO has become something to this effect:

(register shock and fear) Oh, no! The watermelons are about to be completely choked out by weeds! They are sending out their tender little tendrils and will find nowhere to put their roots down! The bugs will all eat the tiny leaves and they will die!

So the watermelons get weeded. Or at least the weeds get mown down so the watermelons have a better chance.

Damage control.

Today I went carrot hunting. Am I the only gardener to be absolutely frustrated with carrots? They took for.ever. to come up, and when they did they looked like little blades of grass, so I didn't dare to weed. Then they started looking more distinctive, and I thinned them and weeded, only ... they didn't all come up. There are large portions of our carrot rows that just had no carrots at all. So I let them be, hoping that these large portions were just as slow to come up as the rest of the carrots had been to start looking like carrots. And then I started with the damage control, and the carrots were very low on my priority list. Occasionally I would peek among the weeds to see if any carrots were down there, and they always seemed to be not growing at all. While the lush and verdant weeds towered over them, the little tiny carrot plants still looked about the size on the seed packet where it shows you how to thin them. Do they really just grow that slow? Or are my carrots stunted because I've neglected them and left them to the weeds?

So my project today was to rescue the carrots from the weeds. I wasn't about to weed the whole rows in all the places where the carrots weren't, because are you crazy? Instead, I found myself bizarrely hunting for carrots through weeds up to my knees, pulling them up wherever I saw a carrot frond.

carrots, pictured with background of thriving weeds

Welcome to the jungle.

In happier news, garden excitement:

baby watermelons

baby squash

and baby tomatoes

please turn red, little green tomatoes

Corn and tomatoes!

Rows of more watermelons than we will know what to do with