Here’s your first clue: I’m only showing the cut off tops because my Atomic Purple carrots look a lot bigger that way.

Here’s your second clue: This post in no way mentions the Atomic Red carrots I sowed at the same time.

And why do they hybridize veggies into weird-ass colors on the outside when they’re always the normal color on the inside?

I must be the only gardener in the world with garlic smaller than the cloves I planted last fall. Here’s how to grow some of this fine delicacy yourself.

1. Plant your garlic a little later than you should, say maybe around December.
2. For lack of a better spot, plant it in that empty bed under the pine tree.
3. In March, regret planting your garlic under a pine tree and—although the garden literature is split 50/50 on whether it’s wise to move it—decide that you’re willing to risk it since yours is planted under a pine tree.
4. Dig up ALL of your garlic instead of leaving half of it to hedge your bets.
5. Carefully place your garlic in a plastic nursery pot and cover the delicate roots with a scoop of dirt so they don’t dry out while you get distracted by some other project for the entire month of April.
6. Transplant your garlic to your new raised beds, and cut off the healthy green foliage so it doesn’t flop over and make your rows untidy.
7. Be sure to companion plant your garlic beside your gargantuan broccoli to properly shade it from the sun.
8. Wait all summer for your garlic to grow.
9. Conclude at the end of August that you truly are a sorry gardener.
10. Dig up your garlic and start over, skipping all of the steps above.

Finally! I picked my first batch of bush beans, which I sowed on Mother’s Day. Yep, 100 long days ago for 52-day beans. That’s the type of impressive veggie gardening we pull off here in the cool and gloomy Pacific Northwest, folks—in case you’re reading this for gardening advice, which I hope you’re not.

I’ve struggled all summer with how to refer to these beans because they’re not really “green” beans, and “purple beans” just doesn’t sound right. And their proper name, Royal Burgundy Bush Beans, is a little stuffy for my tastes, like a dog registered with the AKC as Sir Belvedere Leopold Studmuffin, but you just call him Ed—in case you’re reading this for dog-naming advice, which I hope you’re not.

To further confuse the issue, the green ones are technically Blue Lake beans, even though they don’t look the slightest bit blue to me. Next year I’m keeping it simple and holding out for a package labeled Just Plain Old Green green beans. Because when you cook the purple ones, they turn green anyway, which was a mighty big surprise—in case you’re reading this for cooking advice, which I hope you’re not.

It sure didn’t take long for me to start mourning the loss of fresh veggies. It just feels vulgar to buy them at the grocery store now, where they’re all naked and vulnerable with the dirt washed off, the bug-riddled leaves stripped away, and the stalks neatly trimmed. I can’t believe I used to find veggies like that appealing.

It’s odd that I miss fresh veggies so much because I don’t have an official veggie garden, and you know I couldn’t grow a damned zucchini this year. I think I’ll just mention that in every post until I get the chance to redeem myself.

I flirted with the idea of building some raised beds in late summer and planting some winter greens, but I decided to reign in those enthusiasm ponies and plan that project properly this winter as something to look forward to next year. In the meantime, it’s bagged lettuce for me.

I must miss the veggies so much because our friends shared their Jubilee Farms co-op allotment with us so many times. My favorite e-mails of the summer were Lisa asking if I wanted to do the Friday pickup because they were going out of town. There at the end, I’d resorted to sending them free tickets for weekend getaways, with the stipulation that they left on Thursday.

I loved loading up my market basket—which in previous years had held the extra rolls of toilet paper in the guest bath—and laying out all of those fresh greens on the kitchen counter to figure out what we needed to eat immediately and what could wait until later in the week. It forced me to plan menus and to cook—something I typically hate—but cooking seemed less like a “chore” and more like an “opportunity” to enjoy those great fresh veggies at their best.

Now all that’s left of those jubilant days is an onion and three heads of garlic. They’re like old friends. I remember brushing the dirt off the onion when I brought it home. When it started to sprout, I felt bad about “wasting” it. But then I realized that seeing it every day makes me happier than anything I would’ve cooked with it, so maybe its purpose now is to sit on the countertop and remind me of summer.

When I brought home that huge bundle of garlic, I never imagined it would all be gone by now. It was so fresh that the tissue around the cloves was still moist, had barely turned to paper. Grocery store garlic, with its half-desiccated cloves in cardboard shells is going to be a large disappointment. But I’m going to plant some of that Jubilee garlic this week, so maybe I’ll see it again next year.

And imagine my surprise when I opened the bottom crisper drawer and found two Jubilee cabbages—one purple, one green. Let’s not calculate how long they’ve been in the fridge since our last allotment, but they were still perfectly crisp and fresh, and they tasted yummy when I fried them up. Or maybe they just tasted like summer’s last jubilee.

Somehow, even though I couldn’t grow a damned zucchini this year, I did produce a jack-o-lantern pumpkin. Jack’s a little on the small side, and he didn’t get enough sun to turn orange because he was in the too-shady hill bed with the other veggies—but, by gum, I grew a pumpkin.

Jack’s an incredibly well-documented gourd. I was so thrilled to be growing a pumpkin, that I’ve been snapping shots of him from the time he was just a blossom to the day I finally accepted that he wasn’t going to be orange like other pumpkins and cut him from the vine. There are some first-born human children with fewer photos. But I’ll spare you a mother’s love and just include his senior portrait.

There was, sadly, a false start with another little pumpkin a few blossoms higher on the vine that grew to the size of my thumb and then withered. After that, I assumed that my pumpkin hopes were dashed, leaving me with nothing but an empty, sprawling 8-foot pumpkin vine. But I was uncharacteristically patient and left the vine alone and, lo and behold, it grew another two feet and sprouted another little pumpkin.

I hesitated to get my hopes up, but the little pumpkin that became Jack got as big as my thumb, and then as big as my fist, and then so big and heavy that the vine could no longer hold it up, and it gently rolled over onto the ground. That’s when I knew I was in business for a homegrown pumpkin this year.

Now Jack’s a fine boy, and I’ve gotten a kick out of watching him grow—but he’s not quite the great pumpkin.

The great pumpkin is that little one beside Jack. Fa grew it for me several years ago. It’s a little thing, about the size of a lime. But, hey, it did turn orange. He dried it in the microwave and sent it to me. It’s looking a little worse for wear these days—the skin is nobbly and starting to flake, and it weighs a little bit of nothing—but every year when I find it tucked away among the fall decorations, I smile and put it proudly on my kitchen table. That’s the great pumpkin.

Thank God for QFC because I’d be a piss-poor pioneer (and a damned skinny one, too). That is the sum total of my squash harvest this year. Yeah, I know the red thing is an apple (which actually is from QFC). I suggest you use the stem of the apple as your size gauge. It makes the squash look larger.

How pathetic. I mean, really. One yellow squash?! It’s a crookneck, by the way. I understand if you weren’t quite certain. And three piddling zucchini the size of my little finger? Come on. It’s zucchini for cripe’s sake. And the most disgusting thing about the zucc is that I set out PLANTS in May, while a friend planted some FROM SEED … on the spur of the moment NOT UNTIL JULY … and she has it coming out her ears. Fortunately, she was kind enough to share a couple with me, so I have not passed the summer without fried zucchini. However, I am fading into fall starved of yellow squash. It’s a good thing Kim over at IOG invited me over for squash dinner a couple of times this summer.

And, as for you, Heather over at Idaho Small Goat Garden, well you just pretend you never read this. You’re my homesteading heroine what with your canning and fruit rolling and putting up and 400 ears of corn and laying chickens and eating chickens and pergolas and what all. You even inspired me to put up some frozen sweet corn (which I bought from QFC) and sawed off the cob using the bundt pan the way you do and Mr. Sorry thought I was a genius until I fessed up that I got the idea from you. So you just pretend you never read this post so I don’t have to completely die from embarrassment that I can’t grow a zucchini.

What went wrong? Well, I’m not sure. Like I said, I set out plant starts in May. I put them in the sunniest spot I thought I had. I even (gasp!) watered them because they were near the tomatoes, which I guarded with my life this year. Hmm. Nothing.

Possibly this is some karmic retribution by the bees refusing to pollinate after I mowed off the clover flowers in the yard because I couldn’t stand the “untidiness.” More likely, as I’ve watched the sun patterns on the hill this year, it’s not as sunny there as I assumed. And I already knew the soil was poor. Hmm.

Maybe Santa will bring me some raised beds over in the sunny side yard for Christmas?

And you thought I was a sorry gardener. See what I can produce with a week of vacation? And I don’t even have a vegetable garden.

Some friends are out of town and gave us their weekly allotment of fresh veggies from the co-op. I’m sure they extended such a gracious offer because Mr. Sorry and I are such upstanding folks and not just because Jubilee Farm is in our neck of the woods. Mr. Sorry drives past it on his way to the Carnation golf course, but I’d never been there. It was a fun outing, even though I felt a little weird picking up someone else’s veggies.

Before I picked up my fresh organic loot, I wandered out to the U-Pick field to see what was growing.

Snap peas on the vine! They’d been picked over pretty thoroughly, and Jubilee-owner Wendy mentioned that they were waiting for a flush of new crop. But I found a few to nibble. Unfortunately, since I knew nothing about snap peas, I ate a couple of skinny flat ones that would’ve been the new crop before I realized I should keep my hands off those and only eat the fat ones. I think that’s actually what Wendy was hinting at. Damn. They were so sweet and yummy. Possibly even worth the hassle to string them up properly and grow them at home. And I assure you that right after I snapped the photo of that particular snap pea, I ate it. Mmm.

Of course I have nasturtiums in my own garden, but I ate a couple of Jubilee’s anyway. You know food nearly always tastes better when you eat out, even if it’s edible flowers. I have to admit that I was starting to feel a bit like a deer, though, standing in the field browsing on someone else’s plants.

I didn’t know bachelor’s buttons were so pretty, but I don’t get out much.
 
Here’s how they grow tomatoes in the Pacific Northwest, folks. Greenhouses. So if mine die on the vine in my puny plot, I don’t want to hear any guff.

The aptly named golden centurian stood proud as a Roman legion. It looks a whole lot like a weed, but it sure was fun to photograph its fluffy plumes in various states of bloom and demise.

The camomile smelled just like it does in a tea bag and kinda made me sneeze, but it’s just so darned cheerful that I had to have a cup to go.

And, although it’s just July, I’m already tired of dragging around the garden hose, so I had a serious fit of lust over the irrigation system.

I finally wandered back into the market to pick up my veggies: fresh spinach, mixed lettuce, red lettuce, bok choy, kale, broccoli, scallions (since they still had dirt on the roots, let’s call them green onions), turnips, and kohlrabi.

For dinner last night, it was shrimp on the grill, a fresh mixed salad, and fresh broccoli. It was the best broccoli I’ve ever had in my life (and I love broccoli). So sweet, so tender, so not bitter. Damn. I’m going to have to plant real veggies next year, aren’t I?

I’m not exactly sure what to do with the turnips and kohlrabi. But maybe Heather, my favorite vegetarian blogger over at Grow It. Eat it., will stop by and suggest a good recipe. Hint, hint.

And thanks Lisa and Amritansh for sharing your veggies jubilee.

Over the weekend, I realized that I hadn’t bought my veggies yet and that I was running out of time to let them shrivel up in their pony packs for a couple of weeks before I plant them.

I don’t have a vegetable plot, so I usually just mix them in among the perennials. I like growing edibles for the same reason that I like being able to drive a stick shift car, start a hot fire, and hammer a straight nail—all handy skills in case the plug gets pulled on technology.

So I swung by the True Value to pick up some veggies real quick, but apparently everyone else in Duvall had also swung by to pick up some veggies real quick because the racks were nearly empty. Only the vegetables that no one really likes were left. Artichokes and spaghetti squash were particularly plentiful. But I got lucky and found one last zucchini hiding out with the basil, and two crookneck squash tucked away among the cucumbers—unless they were mislabeled and I’m in for a surprise.

What I really wanted was tomatoes, but the only plants left that were “of some size” were heirlooms. Tomatoes are hard to pull off in Seattle because they don’t exactly thrive in gloom. So unless you have a green thumb or a greenhouse, you need to cheat a little and buy tomato plants “of some size”—waist high usually does the trick. Cherry tomatoes are especially popular because they increase (but don’t guarantee) your chances of success.

Although we’ve lived here for 15 years, Mr. Sorry and I still mourn the ease of growing a tomato. We both grew up in the heart of the Midwest and spent our childhood summers eating huge, juicy red tomatoes warm off the vines in our grandparents’ abundant gardens. So it’s hard to accept that it’s difficult to grow a tomato. And despite that, there’s always a big run on them every spring, so you better get them when the getting is good—which I failed to do this year until only the heirlooms were left.

Now “heirloom” plants always intimidate me. I know it just means they’ve been around for ages, but they seem “special,” and special plants tend to have needs that exceed my sorry attention span. Heirlooms are also more expensive, and I feel a whole lot better when veggies wither on the vine if I only spent $1.49. Frankly, heirloom tomatoes also look a little shoddy and misshapen—and that’s on the glossy sign selling their virtues. So I can only imagine how bad they’ll look in my garden.

Nevertheless, I bought a couple of plants. One is a Black Prince, even though I can’t say I’m excited about growing black tomatoes. How do I know when they’re ripe? And I’m fairly certain that Mr. Sorry is not going to be impressed with the fruits of my labor when I lay a slice of juicy black tomato on his plate, even if I lovingly cite its heirloom pedigree.

The other plant is a Cherokee Purple, whose sign read like a history lesson. Apparently, it was grown by the Cherokee Indians and has survived in cultivation for more than 100 years. How long you wanna bet it lasts in my garden?