We Bought a House

By Christopher Miller

How tall is too tall for a tomato plant? How about jalapenos, or bell peppers?

This wild, dry summer has been interesting for my garden that is currently spitting out dozens of beefsteak and cherry tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, string beans, and bell peppers.

Our tomatoes have grown to astronomical heights. Have you ever seen a 5’ tomato plant? How about 3’ of peppers? It might be dry in the northern end of the state, but for some reason the garden has been very productive this year. So much so that we are going to begin canning these tomatoes and peppers as soon as we can find some free time.

On the days of no rain we settled on watering the garden every other day. If there was a random downpour, then it would be a few days of waiting to turn on the sprinkler. I have also been very adamant about cutting off the “suckers,” which are little chutes of branches that grow in between strong, sturdy stems and suck the life and water out of the plant.

“Suckers” really don’t do much for the plant but harm it by taking water and ground nutrients away, and I hadn’t heard much about these until my wife was telling me about it from a YouTube video she had seen. Actually, I thought that I went a bit overboard in my last cutting, but the plants did not die.

What have been casualties so far were our zucchini, summer squash, and two-thirds of our cucumber plants. They have all stopped producing delicious vegetables and have since been ripped from the garden and placed in our compost. Wouldn’t it be funny if they started to grow out of our compost pile?

Also with the lack of rain has been the lack of weeds in the garden.

The last time I cut the grass or weeded the garden was a few days before Independence Day. I just cut the grass on Friday evening and weeded the garden on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately the weeds just don’t stop growing, but they certainly would have taken over the garden if we would have had all of the rain in a normal summer. Rumor has it there’s a guy in Beech Creek with a 13-foot tall normal variety weed growing on his property. Call the Guiness Records folks!

Now, when staring at a pile of tomatoes one would think about canning them which we are about to do. I just don’t know if we want to crush them, dice them, or just instantly sauce them and have shelf-ready tomato sauce for spaghetti night. The sky’s the limit here!

I hope that your gardens are as fruitful and overbearing as mine is so far. I just wish we had more rain.