How does your garden grow?

Well, another vegetable garden growing season is slowly coming to an end. I say slowly because it's still so hot out that my tomatoes don't seem to know that they're supposed to be calling it quits soon.

So, how did my garden do this year? Well, first of all I can say that although at the beginning of the season, it appeared as if I was going to grow another jungle, the fact that all my cucumber plants and my zucchini plant died off early meant the jungle was kept at bay.

Yup, unfortunately, I lost my four cucumber plants first, followed soon thereafter by my zucchini plant. In each case, a plant would look healthy in the morning and would be completely dead by night. I assume that they attracted some sort of pest and not as a result of poor planting or lack of watering because they were planted right next to my tomatoes. And I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with.

Anyway, as for the dead plants, four cucumber plants only produced 2 cukes before dying. The zucchini plant produced 3 before keeling over. In other words, to make salsa I had to buy zucchini and I still haven't made relish because I haven't gotten around to buying cucumbers.

On to the tomatoes. As I said, I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with. I planted 5 large tomato plants and 2 grape tomato plants. To date, I've made a batch of tomato sauce and a batch of salsa and I have enough tomatoes chopped up and in the freezer to make another batch of salsa. And they keep growing. We eat tomatoes with lunch and we eat tomatoes with dinner. And they keep growing. Pretty soon my neighbours are going to be getting tomatoes left on their doorstep.

But the funniest part of all is that not only are they growing, but they're reproducing. When we returned home from the cottage 4 weeks ago, a small tomato plant had sprouted between the patio stones, next to the barbecue about 20 feet away from the nearest tomato plant. Rather than pulling it out, I left it as I was curious to see if it would actually produce tomatoes.

It has (notice how I had to tie it to the downspout on the side of the house because I couldn't exactly drive a stake through the patio stones). It appears to be grape tomatoes.

The newest vegetable we planted this year was lettuce -- and that was the best thing I've ever done. For the entire month of June and some of July, whenever we wanted a salad, we would simply walk into the backyard, pick a few leaves and walk back in. It was fantastic and I'll definitely plant it again.

Now you may be wondering how did I fit all of that (oh yeah, and a raspberry bush, a jalapeno plant and a strawberry plant that only produces enough strawberries for the squirrels to eat) fit in my little garden. Well, it didn't, I cut out a section of grass on the other side of the yard where I planted the lettuce, the strawberries, the jalapeno and one tomato plant.

It was that one tomato plant that did way better than any other plant. It produces monster-sized tomatoes (seriously, one of them weighed 1.2 pounds!) and is still producing.

So, that, in a nutshell was this year's garden. Anyone want a tomato or five?