readers? we have a problem.

The Smart car is gone. Bye bye to it. I am now the proud owner of a nice, old Volvo that seriously needs some work done to it. Eh. Why should a new(ish) car have uncontrollable problems with it? Even if I had had it checked out by a mechanic or asked the right questions something is bound to go wrong. 

My mom came up a few days ago and played in the garden with me. P was out of town and Mom and I spent most of our time lounging on the stairs. It was wonderful! The tomatoes were looking great and the sunflowers had grown about three feet since I had last been out there. It was like a magical garden where anything could happen. I took some pictures of the garden a few days ago, meaning to post them sooner. I had really great intentions. Mieko absolutely loved the garden. And then I really looked at some of the cucumber plants. Not all of them looked strange, but some of them seemed to be wilting. I very diligently trimmed the wilted leaves off, hoping not to spread anything that might make them wilt. 

Some of the plants looked like they had wilted. Whoa, I thought. Why was it happening to only some of the plants? Why, if they are all getting the same water, were some of them bad? So I fertilized with gross fish insides figuring I would make everything better and proceeded to clip the wilted leaves. If the whole plant was dead, I clipped it right at the base and took it out.

The cucumbers just looked so bad. Ok. So before I get into the rest of this little story, you should take a look at the garden as I saw it a few days ago. 

The cucumber flowers were everywhere! At each intersection was a little happy flower. Even the dried ones looked happy.

The zucchini and squash plants, too, were doing so well. The bottom stems are beginning to die off, but the arms that are newer produce(d) well.

And my little baggy cat, Mieko, heard one of those mysterious garden monsters that like to creep around. She's always on the lookout for those.

Every single pepper plant (all eight or nine of them) have massive amounts of fruit on them. Ok, so the fruits aren't that big in size, just very abundant. I'm completely convinced that they are all going to ripen at the same time (probably tomorrow), so P and I will have to eat stuffed peppers until we start looking like our food. I guess it's bound to happen.

A few weeks ago I was convinced that there was some sort of pollination problem in the garden. The food plants haven't been yielding too much fruit so I figured that CCD had killed off important species in our city. This sucker was at least one inch long, no joke. I was actually kind of afraid for a moment. (Yes, I know how ridiculous that is.)

The tomatoes were looking great a few days ago! Even where it looks like a little flower has died, a little baby tomato is right there taking its place. Oh, it is wonderful!

This blemish was the only problem with all of the tomatoes-- just a scratch. Cosmetic.

One of my favorite parts of having tomato plants is walking through them. Walking in between the sunflowers and the tomatoes, I get dizzy with the happy scent of fresh, healthy life. When I pass by a little stem that is perky and swollen with green tomatoes, I get so happy. No, it's not just the smell. I guess it's the statement. "Look," my subconscious says to me. It's always with exclamation points. "Look what you helped make happen! Fruit! Food! Life! You are going to sustain your life and the animals around you with these amazing creations!" Sometimes the exclamations get to be a little much.

But holy crap! Other than giving birth to a child, I feel like growing food is the one thing that provides life. Even with childbirth, how could it happen without food? Growing and consuming food thoughtfully is, therefore, the most productive way to provide and sustain life.

I love the color of this eggplant. It ends up being striped and slinky. 

And calendula right next to zinnia? Perfect. Especially when it's just a little blurry. 

Bees come in and out of the garden all day, but the one place bees never ever want to leave is the face of a sunflower. With every seed having it's own flower to pollinate, a bee can stay busy for hours when working on sunflowers. 

So here is where we get to the problem. The garden is sick. Like, really sick. Quite similar to "You have two months to live," except to plants instead of humans. And it's not a human diagnosis, it's the disease. And the disease they have can effect the soil tremendously if we keep the plants in there. And it will probably be in the next week that we'll see a rapid disintegration of our plant's health. 

See that tomato plant kind of in the middle? Early blight. Early blight is a scary thing. Apparently (I am no expert, I get all my info second hand from P) once a plant gets blight there is nothing that can be done. Well, except kill it and hope that none of the plants are touching it. From the photo I hope you can tell that every one of our plants is touching another one. P also says that it is important to get the effected plants out early. Oops. I thought it wasn't getting enough water or something. 

Blight can come around quickly, through soil, low air circulation, or with the plant itself. Well crap. By the way, it's what caused the potato famine. 

In my mind, once the plants bore fruit nothing should touch them! They are set, busy creating fruit for sustaining life. Bees like the plants, they get water, we fertilize. Why should anything else go wrong? We even amended the soil when tilling the ground. 

Apparently my idea was way off. 

And my cucumbers you might ask? This just might be the saddest photo I have ever taken. Not only for the poor quality, but because only four young plants are left. 

The cucumbers have wilted. After a quick Google search, and a lovely article,  I have discovered that they are infected by bacterial wilt, carried and spread by cucumber beetles. We decided to leave a large section of the infected plants on the trellis but out of the ground. Hopefully they will deter the bugs from the good plants. Other than that hopefully we will be able to get one more cuke. By the way, all of this happened in the past five hours. 

I got home, noticed that the damn cucumbers were looking shady, and began a brief search, and proceeded to pull out ten cucumber plants. I am not happy. I am furious and sad. I mean, the one way we can sustain life and I fail at it! I know, a little out of proportion. 

Did I mention my car has a problem? 

It might be different if cucumber beetles did something nice in return. Nope. They eat the leaves off of my vegetable plants (not even the fruit!!) and end up killing them. 

My mantra has been "think happy thoughts" tonight. After crying and feeling like a complete failure because my whole garden is going to have to be uprooted (gentile mocking is completely allowed), I am still at a loss for why something like this has happened. And you know the silly thing is is that I was going outside to spray the cucumber plants with soapy water. Eh. 

I wish I could say that there is a moral to the story. Nope. There is no bright side, light at the end of the tunnel, funny story, or other cute name for a little anecdote. This fricken sucks.